Geeking At School

Respect of other people is a vital part of a functioning, healthy society. Giving respect to others seems to be a common mantra, at least in the high school I went to.... It is extremely important that those of us who work with students give them all the respect they deserve and more. Why? Because these students are the future--and that is not just a buzz-phrase. They may very well be your boss, representative, or even the guy coming to fix the plumbing in your house....and if they remember you as the technician, teacher or educator who yelled at them (or otherwise acted negatively toward them) how is that going to affect your future professional relationship? Seems like when I was going to school, respect seemed to be mainly a one-way street with some teachers. My classmates and I had to give our teachers and authority respect, but we were just little grubmuffins who didn't deserve the time of day. Obviously, this more the exception to the rule rather than a blanket statement, but...

Apple's iPad has been beaten to death (figuratively), analyzed, and picked apart by numerous people, bloggers, commentators, know-it-alls, fanboys, and haters. I'm sure I fit in there somewhere, probably somewhere between fanboy and know-it-all. In case you have been living under a rock for the past couple of days, Apple is releasing the iPad 2 on March 11. It's faster, better, lighter, and so on and so forth, much what you'd expect from Apple's improvements on its own product. Now, how this relates to education: the iPad is an awesome device and does what it does very, very well. As Apple tends to do, the iPad has defined a whole market and set the bar very, very high. But, despite it's awesomeness, it has been both embraced and despised by those in education. Our Technology Department has leaned toward the 'despising iPad' side of the spectrum. I personally love the idea, and can see many places it would work in the classroom; however, the biggest hurd...

Our department watched a demo of the free version of a hosted website for the school district this morning. My boss has been rolling through the demos and calls in response to her RFP that she put out for webhosting….and this was just another step in the horrendous but necessary Erate process. For those of you not in education, don't ask. Erate is a pain to deal with, although it does allow schools to actually afford technology. But I digress. As we were watching the demo, a flash of "duh" hit me: what do we even want to accomplish with our website? Everyone knows that if an organization does not have a compelling website, it, in essence, fails to exist. The world does not revolve around yellow phonebooks anymore. But why do we need one with a bunch of bells and whistles? And who is it for? It seemed that we were focusing a lot on comparing shiny things from one CMS company with the perhaps more-shiny tools and widgets from another CMS company..... As I sat there and thou...