Comments on: Security vs Learning?

By: Cindy Seibel

Cindy Seibel — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 14:42:13 +0000

I’ll say upfront that I am a tech director. One of the dilemmas for tech staff is the need to support all teachers in their request for “when-I-turn-it-on-it-works”. With limited staff time, this can turn into a survival, lock-it-down mentality. And I won’t deny I’ve heard from other districts that “these are district tools and we determine how they will be used”.

In our district, we’ve been working hard to find the balance for our teacher laptop program – we’ve created an image that lets teachers customize, download some software (that doesn’t change OS), and connect to wireless networks outside the school. We deliver “out-of-the-box” training sessions for staff not familiar with what can be done (good and bad) with their devices.

My point is that it is not always about control, it is about providing good service. Service needs to include both room for teachers to be creative and innovative and for the systems to be available and reliable for that creativity to happen. Our teachers new to this space will (and have) turn(ed) away if there are too many barriers to success.

Let’s work together to find the balance.

By: One Size Fits All | Educational Origami

One Size Fits All | Educational Origami — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 03:26:03 +0000

[...] Kelvin was right – things have to change and I am one of the lucky ones. At my school there are several sizes. addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fedorigami.edublogs.org%2F2008%2F03%2F15%2Fone-size-fits-all%2F’; addthis_title = ‘One+Size+Fits+All’; addthis_pub = ”; andrewch posted this entry on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 at 3:25 pm. Posted in the category Resources, management, one to one, reflection, technology You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Grab a free Edublog to get your own comment avatar! [...]

By: Toni

Toni — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:28:59 +0000

WoooHooo!!!

This is a HUGE problem in schools – the tail is definitely wagging the dog so to speak… as IT techs make decisions on educational best practice. NOT GOOD. Teachers are having to beg and fight to get minor, minor alterations made… No wonder so many teachers are anti-technology – it is made very very difficult – often by the people who are there (ironically) to make it easier…

Sorry to rant – but this really is a big, big problem that I feel really, really strongly about.

Interesting conversation on Edtechtalks yesterday – mostly about blocking of web content – the same problems are occurring in the US also – we are not alone!

By: nix

nix — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 09:17:28 +0000

Yes, I did write about this very same matter just last week. It seems to me that many school networks are designed to suit the tech support crew rather than the people who work inside them.

The issue that you faced is really quite trivial for a decent techie. Obviously there are differences between Macs and PCs, but it’s super simple to put together simple reg files to allow a teacher to load or unload a proxy on a PC.

But that’s not really the issue is it?

By: Artichoke

Artichoke — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 06:42:02 +0000

Check out Nix on Who owns your network for some useful elaboration on these questions/ ideas

By: AllanahK

AllanahK — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:17:08 +0000

Firstly- thank you for providing the tech support at L@S.

And secondly I TOTALLY agree- the first thing I did on my TELA laptop was customise it- make it my own. But a lot would give up the battle before it got that far- I was trying to show ERO some of our work a while back at an ERO office- they were on DIAL-UP! Podomatic was blocked and they couldn’t update their flash player because the system was so locked down. I felt sad for them.