GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

iPads might be good for tracking student behavior and playing interactive learning games. But they’re not the best for checking Department of Education email accounts.

The department will no longer allow people with @schools.nyc.gov email addresses to manage their accounts through their iPad, iTouch, and Google Android devices, according to an email sent last week by an official in the DOE’s Division of Instructional and Information Technology. (I saw the letter on the NYC Education News email list.)

The official, Tom Kambouras, said many DOE employees had adopted the new devices in recent months.

“While these devices are changing the way we do our business, it has [sic] also presented us with a few IT challenges as well,” Kambouras wrote. A major one, he said, is that syncing accounts to some mobile devices has stretched the department’s email server to capacity — meaning that there can be “no exceptions” to the new policy.

The problem is neither universal nor totally debilitating: DOE employees who tote Blackberries, which the department has for years issued to some officials, will still be able to access their email accounts. And until the server problem is fixed, iPad users can check their DOE email through their web browsers.

Still, the new policy is a reminder that in the department’s race to adopt new technologies, infrastructure can be an obstacle. (more…)

Teach for America members aren’t the only teachers to start getting digital tools from a technology giant.

A new partnership between a statewide network of teacher training centers and Microsoft will give teachers access to discounted computer hardware and software, and help using them. Announced this week, the Tech4Teachers program will flood New York State Teacher Centers with new technology options at lower than market-rates. There are 250 center sites in New York City and 130 more throughout the state, offering in-person and virtual assistance to public and private school teachers.

Microsoft’s assistance comes at a time when state budget cuts have constrained resources at the teacher centers, which provide professional support in the form of online and face-to-face training to teachers across the state. The centers were cut from last year’s state budget, but this year the Assembly budgeted $20.5 million for them, approximately half of what the centers have been funded for in the past, according to Gail Moon, the state’s acting teacher centers program director.

Though the centers receive support from the state’s teachers union and some local unions, including the United Federation of Teachers, they primarily rely on the state for funding.

The partnership with Microsoft may alleviate some of the financial stress on teacher centers, staff members said, adding that the stress is particularly sharp now that the centers are  tasked with helping teachers and networks understand new instructional standards and integrate technology in their classroom.

“The way we’re looking at doing that is using technology by offering more webinars, electronic video conferencing capabilities, more professional development to more people, and then reducing the cost,” said Stan Silverman, co-chair of the centers’ technology committee.

Silverman said he will also use the program to show state legislators that teachers centers need more resources. (more…)

A second-generation iPad displays an application on the Common Core standards.

This month, 9,000 Teach For America members are trading in their post-it notes for iPads thanks to a donation from Apple.

They are joining the growing ranks of educators who must decide how to use new iPads in their classrooms. It’s an open question facing teachers across the city who received iPads from their principals this year or bring their personal iPad to school from home.

Teach for America distributed iPads to its new teachers stationed in 43 regions of the United States, including New York City, over the past three weeks. The tablets, mostly refurbished first-generation iPads turned in by owners eager to upgrade when new models came out this spring, were donated to TFA by Apple earlier this year.

“Through this opportunity, corps members will explore ways iPad can be used as a powerful teaching tool in the classroom,” Danielle Montoya, a TFA spokesperson, said over email.

Teachers say they received the new technology without any specific guidance from TFA officials on how to use it. (more…)

School for Global Studies "master" teacher, Natasha Blakley, prepares for the start of school in the Brooklyn school's new computer lab, purchased with federal funds.

To Joseph O’Brien, principal of Brooklyn’s School for Global Studies, there is no clearer indication of how new federal funds have led to higher achievement than Room 326.

The classroom-turned-computer lab, outfitted with 35 Apple computers purchased last winter, is being used by students to recover credits toward graduation and study languages online, and by parents who lack Internet access at home. In addition to two laptop carts and new smartboards for a dozen classrooms, the lab replaces the school’s once-meager technology offerings, which included aging classroom computers hampered by viruses and two broken smartboards.

“For the first time, our students were able to have a dedicated room where they could use the computer on their own time, whether after school or on their lunch hour, with staffed personnel,” he said.

Tasked with raising the school’s graduation rate when the Department of Education appointed him to run Global Studies last year, O’Brien sees the new lab as a main tool. He paid for the lab with $170,000 of the $890,000 in federal School Improvement Grants awarded to Global Studies because it landed on the state’s list of lowest-performing schools last year—requiring the city to overhaul it.

For Global Studies and 10 other schools on the list, the city chose “transformation,” meaning they would receive new principals and nearly $2 million in School Improvement Grants over three years to buy extra supplies and support. The city is starting to overhaul another 33 schools this year under three improvement models.

As the 6th through 12th-grade school enters its second year of transformation — bringing it a second infusion of cash — O’Brien said change is already being felt.

“We are no longer the school that we once were,” he said. “This school is really becoming an oasis of learning.”

Now he just has to convince families that that’s true.  (more…)

Joel Rose, founder of the School of One, is leaving the New York City Department of Education

The founder of the School of One, one of the city’s most touted educational innovations, will expand that model nationally — by leaving the city Department of Education that helped him create it. The founder, Joel Rose, announced his move in an email to colleagues this morning.

The School of One is part of a national effort to re-imagine how teaching and learning happen at schools by taking advantage of technology. At the three schools that work with the School of One model in New York City, teachers still lead instruction, but they do so with the aid of a “learning algorithm” that creates a personalized program of study for every student.

The idea is to free educators from the more rote elements of school and let them, as Rose put it to us in 2009, “focus on is the hardest part of the equation, which is delivering great lessons.” In the first pilot of the program, a summer math program launched in 2009, School of One reported that its students learned significantly faster, citing externally commissioned research.

The three schools will continue to operate under the guidance of the Innovation Zone, or iZone, team inside Tweed Courthouse. But with Rose’s departure, the national apparatus around School of One — from press attention to large foundation grants — will leave the Department of Education and follow him to a new nonprofit he plans to create.

The move raises questions about New York City’s capacity to act as an incubator for educational innovation. For one, will programs incubated by the iZone stay in New York City for the long haul? Or will they follow the School of One’s path: attracting national attention for a few years and then seeking another home? (more…)

Eight more schools will open this fall with the goal of using technology to change the way students and teachers work together, according to Schools Chancellor Joel Klein’s inaugural column on the Huffington Post’s new New York City site.

The schools will be in the model of the NYCiSchool, a small, selective high school that opened in Tribeca last fall as the first school in the city’s NYC21C initiative. (The name refers to the “21st-century skills” that technology-infused schools teach.) Klein touted the iSchool at the small schools panel discussion he introduced last week, saying that the school provides an example of how technology can be used to ”tailor the instructional journey of the child to the child’s needs.”

In his column today, Klein writes that the iSchool is pioneering a new “technology ‘culture,’” one that more schools should emulate:

In the past three years, the New York City Department of Education has created a number of technologies that allow teachers, principals, and parents to better understand students’ strengths and weaknesses and create academic programs that are tailored to the students’ needs. …

For New York City, the next big change is to change our technology “culture,” so we begin using modern tools to rethink the way our schools and classrooms are organized to most effectively engage students and bolster their achievement.

An iSchool student, Angelica Modabber, wrote about getting accustomed to using technology in her classes on this site in December. (more…)

The online testing system's logo.

Here’s an unusual complaint from a Bedford Stuyvesant elementary school, about the city’s online testing system called Acuity. Acuity gives tests to students throughout the year and lets teachers and parents monitor how they do — what subjects the children are doing well in and which they aren’t.

Usually, critics complain that Acuity, which the Department of Education has purchased from the CTB McGraw Hill company, is a waste of money that encourages children to be over-tested.

But the complaint in Bed-Stuy, from Lisa North, a literacy coach at P.S. 3, is that Acuity isn’t available enough. North’s argument is that since the statewide English exam is scheduled for next month, the holiday break should be a natural time for parents to help students prepare for the test, which can determine whether a child is promoted to the next grade. But North says family prep time will be hampered because Acuity is scheduled to shut down over the holidays, from December 28th to January 4th. (more…)

A commenter named Scott raised readers’ eyebrows by declaring that Obama’s choice for education secretary, Arne Duncan, doesn’t use a computer. Scott added, intriguingly, that:

“His secretary prints out the emails he receives, he writes the response and the secretary responds. The man literally does not know how to use a computer.”

Not exactly, according to two spokesmen I just talked to at the Chicago public schools headquarters. It is true, they said, that Duncan sometimes has his assistant, a woman named Maribel, print out his e-mail messages for him. But he does have a computer, and he sometimes reads his own e-mail with it. He also carries a Blackberry.

Said spokesman Mike Vaughn:

“He’s out at schools all the time, meeting with principals and meeting with administrators, meeting with kids and teachers, various meetings throughout the city. He does not spend a whole lot of time at his desk. But there are times when he sits at his desk and reads his emails, there’s times that he responds to them with Maribel, there’s times that he responds with his Blackberry.”

Another spokesman, Malon Edwards, said Duncan has championed bringing technology to education. (more…)

A colleague drew my attention to this fascinating video, tied to The New York Times Magazine’s screens issue. It plays a series of young people’s faces captured while they played a video game.

I wonder what would it look like to videotape the same kids in class.

(For more on the notion that schools have something to learn from video games, see this Times story, this story I wrote for the Village Voice, and this Web site, the home of Marc Presnky, an educational consultant who has made a career out of the idea.)

One teacher-blogger’s school has an Elmo document projector, which no one else seems to know how to use. But that’s okay with her (sort of):

When I arrived for the first day of orientation at my school, the principals were trying to figure out how to use this thing called the Elmo… … Since they made it look so hard, people might not ask to borrow it. This would leave it open for me. Today. I Pounced on it. Ms. B has fallen in love, and the Elmo is locked in our closet for another day. We are hoping to get to the point that we keep it until someone else comes and gets it from us. Otherwise, it just sits in the principal’s closet not being used. My school loves their technology. Mostly, they love their technology as a display. The idea of technology in the classroom doesn’t quite make any sense.