Mary Jane Warden's blog

If you have an AOL email account and are trying to email the District, you may be getting those messages bounced back to you as undeliverable. We were notified of this happening earlier in August and have been trying to get to the bottom of the situation, outruling everything that we could possibly do on our end. Needless to say, this has been quite frustrating for us as it is for our parents and our community members with whom we are trying to communicate through AOL.

Through our extensive investigation, we discovered that a good number of area school districts are also experiencing this same issue with AOL mail not being delivered to our mail servers. This such an unfortunate circumstance. As of the start of September, we are still waiting for answers from the powers that be in our wide area network and from AOL.

Our administrators have begun discussing issues surrounding copyright. For an educational institution, the practice of copyright is probably foundational with the idea of intellectual property ad crediting information sources. Every teacher's mantra to their students is that plagerism is absolutely a no-no, but it seems that it is hard to practice what we preach. No doubt.

In the world of technology, copyright is a forefront issue. I have head of districts in the past who have been slapped with hefty fines because their licensing doesn't coinside with the number of workstations software is installed on. Software companies are trying their darndest to police this and have come up with clever ways to make sure that the one license you've bought goes on the one computer it is designated for.

I was recently asked a question about wireless networks. It was actually a question that I think has cross many people's minds so I am posting it here with my response.

Question: I currently moved to a new home and have been dependent on my laptop for the last 2 weeks. I have been able to access wireless internet from my new residence even though have not set up any wireless service here. Does this mean I am tapping into someone else's wireless internet? If so, can they somehow view information or web pages that I send/receive/view? I hate to be doing something illegal or hurtful to someone else! Can you help me? As always, thank you for your expertise!

~S

I was reading David Warlick's blog, of which I have an rss feed through Google Reader. He attended a business leaders conference and heard a speaker, Steve Farber, a leadership guru. David noted something he heard from this keynote that struck a cord with me. Steve Farber at one point said, “You want your employees to bring their hearts with them to their jobs.” That has been something on my mind lately. How do we help people bring their hearts to their jobs?

I must say, there are a great number of people I work with in this district that do this everyday...bring their hearts to their jobs. I try to do this everyday as well. And I have been accused of being very passionate about my job, about technology and about education. I try to bring that to our Technology Team in the District.

At the November 7th Board of Education meeting, I was asked to give an update on the current technology developments of the district. I took the opportunity to also inform them of the challenge we now face as educators to help our students gain 21st century skills...as summarized by NETS:

What students should know and be able to do to learn effectively and live productively in an increasingly digital world...

Watch the video "Did You Know?" by two Colorado High School teachers back in August 2006 (updated this past summer). It will make you consider what education should be like in the 21st century. Our Board of Education members are definitely considering it and supporting us in that direction.

I will include my presentation to this blog posting once I have created it as a podcast.

This past June, ISTE - the International Society for Technology in Education - released the next generation of National Educational Technology Standards for students. Back in 1998, ISTE published the first set of National Educational Technology Standards for Students (NETS•S). This was a culmination of research and study across the U.S. to define what students needed to know about and be able to do with technology. These newly revised standards focus more on skills and concepts than on tools and software.

The areas that comprise 21st century skills are the following:

• creativity and innovation;
• communication and collaboration;
• research and information fluency;
• critical thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making;
• digital citizenship; and
• technology operations and concepts

We live in an everchanging technological digital society. We live in a wired world and are raising a wired generation. There is no denying it with the iPods, cell phones, IM, YouTube and MySpace. It IS a different world than when I grew up.

At IL-TCE 2007 in St. Charles last spring, one of the big buzzes was about Google and its development of web-based applications. Google has put out some very cool tools to use in education that have a very Web 2.0 edge to them and I have been trying to think and plan how our District can start using these valuable tools. I discussed how Google Reader can help you become an efficient and informed "blog reader." Now we will be taking a look at other web apps Google has to offer.

So here is an introduction to Google Docs. Google Docs is a suite of applications - word processing, spreadsheets and presentation software - that you can use FOR FREE from ANYWHERE in the world. All the Google Docs applications look and feel very similar to Microsoft Office applications like Word, Excel and Powerpoint. But there is an added feature that make Google Docs even better - collaboration with anyone around the world.

Now that we had launched our extreme makeover for our web site last spring, we now are looking ahead to making it even more functional and manageable. Admittedly, there are several features that we are still trying to make happen. As with any site development, we are on the neverending road of improving people's experience of our web site.

In September, the web team went to a training conference hosted by the developers of the software we use as our content management system - Drupal (see previous blog posting "What's Under the Hood?"). We were able to learn from the experts who created the system and are continuing to improve it. It is uncanny how organic software development is. How you launch something into the world and then continue to tweak it, modify it, and improve it to make it better and better. Sounds so much like growing up! So Drupal in its infancy had many features it still had limitations. As Drupal is now in version 5 (version 6 to be in 2008), we see so many more features that we in the Lincolnwood community - students, teachers, parents, etc. - can immediately use. How do we capitalize on this powerful tool?