The TWAIN blog

From our tech department to all Kerrville ISD staff. We wish you a safe and happy holiday season! We designed our tree completely out of Dell computer packing materials and then decorated it ourselves.

In the past few weeks, I have found connections to my government through several tools I use online to connect to my own professional learning communities. I have not been into the political spectrum as much as a caring citizen should. I have taken government and politics for granted for many years – choosing to stay out of it and away from it. Even during the presidential campaigns, I chose to stay away from the debates and away from the news in general.

I don’t consider myself to be ignorant of the world around me. While I shy away from televised news, I have stayed in the loop through world news on my satellite radio, blogging, online discussions, and a few book recommendations.

All this to say, that now I am connecting to real time discussions about our government and processes through several resources posted online. Just this morning, I started following #dipnote which is the US Department of State on Twitter. I even went to their blog and signed up to receive RSS notifications of their blogs, comments, and video posts.

I have signed on and even posted on change.gov which is President-Elect Obama’s website for gathering input from all of us in the United States.

I guess the point of this post is to say that there are ways to reconnect to change. I am excited about the possibilities of the new President and the change I am already seeing in the communication plans. I am excited to see Web 2.0 embraced by not only the President but the different departments in our government. It is exciting to hear the discussion of these tools I have used for years and not to hear “what a waste of time” in the same sentence. I feel like we have been on the outside and the fringe for a while using these things only to be made fun of for trying.

Exciting times are not on their way. They are here now and we have an opportunity to share with others how they can reconnect with their own government and state agencies. We have the opportunity to show people in our lives how they can use Twitter, blogging, podcasting, RSS, etc. beyond just subscribing to educational resources for their classrooms. They can now connect to their world.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. If you are traveling, be safe!

November 4 marked the introduction of a new president-elect for our nation. It also marked the end of equality in California as defined by the act of marriage for both heterosexuals and homosexuals. The campaign funding for both opponents and proponents raised $35 million for proponents and $37 million for the opposition to Prop 8. Close gap for funding. The vote was close as well: 52% voted yes for Prop 8 and 48% voted no.

Whether you are for Proposition 8 or against it doesn’t matter here. This message is about the rise of a civil rights movement under our noses but using the technology to connect nationwide. I ran a search on Facebook this morning and found over 108 groups already setup to join members of Facebook to petition against “Proposition H8″. Over 500 with the use of the words “Proposition 8″ and another 500 using the phrase “Prop 8″. I ran a Google search on these titles and found many wikis, blogs, websites, and videos for and against Proposition 8. I also found sites that were actively recruiting for future planned events for protesting these causes as well.

This past weekend, major cities (and some smaller ones as well) had protesters at their capital buildings voicing opposition to California’s reversal of marriage rights. How did all these protesters organize? And what’ next for them?

They organized using the same tools we are using in education – Web 2.0, social networking, social streaming. They too are part of the “Human Network” as Cisco calls it in their commercials.

Without listing different sites and all different perspectives here, just know that there is a network supporting or protesting the movement for same-sex marriage nationwide. There is a civil movement taking place around us. And they are planning more events and more ways to spread the message using these social networks and social impact resources.

Imagine 1955 if Rosa Parks had a wiki or a Twitter about her day on a bus. What if the Million Man march in Washington was advocated on a NING, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.? How would the anti-war demonstrations of the Vietnam war gone if they had Web 2.0 tools?

Beyond just this current movement, our president-elect has plans on his site to deliver a weekly video state of the union address using YouTube embedded videos. He already used Twitter to cover his movements in the campaign. Now, he is embracing change using the technology tools.

Now is the time to get our teachers and administrators onboard. The world is passing all of us by when we are limiting the access to these tools to our students and teachers. The world is connecting around us and we are still in the “one-room schoolhouse” mentality. A civil-rights movement is underfoot here in the US of A. What better time to introduce the idea of collaborative network environments than with the movement of civil action? Now is the time to share about “Personal Learning Communities” as these protesting communities are developing and working together world-wide.

Now is the time for our teachers, administrators, students, etc. to connect to connecting.

I recently wrote a note to a friend and colleague. It was one of those stream-of-consciousness type of emails where afterward I thought maybe it should have been a blog post. It is now. I feel like I wrote it to send to my old friends and colleagues in the places I have worked before. This is the note that says camp is fine and I am better because of it.

To my colleagues back….[home?]…..in my previous place,

I am learning a lot. Or to take Toffler’s line: I am “learning, unlearning, and relearning”.

Just when I think I have something figured out, it changes. The new job is really an adventure. There is so much I want to do and so much I want to give to everyone in the district. But I can see how frustrating it can be with rules, restrictions, laws, expectations, and steep hills of resistance to change.

I miss being able to hide out in your classrooms, offices, or libraries. Taking that moment to watch students engaged in learning or hearing someone share more than just a frustration with a piece of equipment. I miss hearing people talk about the shows they watch, the events with their kids, or the movie they went to see. I miss the copy room chatter, the early morning coffee drinkers moving from a low grumble of speech to…well….speech itself.

I miss the energy of the campus and being an integral piece of it, instead of feeling like a guest to all the campuses. (At least I now have a badge and don’t have to sign in each time I visit or run my Raptor badge in my own district.)

This week, I got to watch the local channel which broadcasts district events and saw myself sharing about Trumba calendars, Google Documents, and Internet safety tools for families. The communications director for the district is a parent who reads the calendar events on air for the community. She interviewed me for 45 minutes the other day on camera and we posted it on the community access channel.

What’s amazing too is getting stopped running in to Blockbuster by someone who watched the show and them asking me about Google documents! I went to the local grocery store tonight and heard a mom say to her son in the shopping cart that I did look like the guy they saw on TV.

And I think of the other broadcast ideas I have for not just me sharing technology tools but a live classroom experience of me sharing tools with a groups in studio. Perhaps we could live-blog, Twitter, or even share resources with others while recording the show for the channel here. My brain swarms with ideas!

That’s the fun part of the job! The ideas! I am also on a committee of teachers, principals, a board member, and support staff helping develop ideas for instructional technology for the district. Developing the “vision” if you will for our students. I have done this before and witnessed excellent leadership on how to lead a group. I infused wikis and our conversation is really interesting on that site (wish I could share but it is a closed conversation).

Showing the team a wiki has not only allowed up a common collaborative place but it sparked a new tool for the members to use. This is the first time many of them have seen a wiki. I imagine the same look on the faces around my conference table when showing our wiki was about the same look on the faces of early man seeing a stick on fire the first time.

Something else I did this week, I took my entire team of techs to the high school to work on over 70 old tech requests stuck in the system. That wasn’t as fun! It was one of those “have to do’s” rather than we “want to do”. Before we went, I organized all the requests and then we “huddled” where I told them to do four things:

1) Smile

2) Think “I like you!” – this is based on a customer service technique from a video called “Give Them the Pickle!” with Bob Farrell. I told them to just think that they liked everyone no matter who they came into contact with.

3) Take notes based on what the teachers say. – I told them that half of what they hear isn’t the message. The message is that the teachers want to be heard. If you take notes, you are paying attention and they will LOVE you for it. Truth is – the notes can be used to provide more information about what happened so we can fix it better in the future as well.

4) Test what you complete to make sure it works not just for you but for the user. Common mistake in tech repair is to fix it but not test it with the user’s login.

An entire day of the entire tech team at one campus. And you know what? We did a great job! I think it inspired my crew more than it helped those teachers. The fact that they spent the first hour huddled and reviewing ideas for each request was great as well. Group brainstorming! Teamwork!

I love it. It is definitely these little moments that make it all worth while.

There are LOTS of problems too. It isn’t perfect. People are mad at me. People are frustrated. There’s those kinds of issues of people and progress that go with any job and any day of the week.

But all in all, I am learning more and more about how I can be better and to be a better person. This is just the right training for me at the right time.

Now if only the paddle-boats worked….;p

Imagine gathering the technology directors of your local city offices, hospital, local college, larger business owners, and the county together with your school technology directors. What would be your conversation topics?

I can tell you that meeting the other tech directors of our city was really great today. I call it the “Meeting of the Minds” and the “Heads of the Five Families”. There are technology directors in our city hall, hospital, college, and larger business association along with our education system who can really share ideas and resources.

We discussed similar issues with our networks and software use. We also discussed access to videoconferencing, wireless networks, and the future of cloud/Web 2.0 resources. A really hot topic for us was disaster recovery. I wonder if off-site data recovery could be held at one of these other places to mirror our servers?

I offered an invitation for them to join me at the TECHForum Southwest event in November in Austin and I may have some who want to join us there in that conversation. I gave one of them my TCEA brochure for the conference in February.

But even better, we all agreed to meet together again very soon.

Can I make a suggestion to other technology directors? Make friends with your local counterparts as well. What a great way to network and share resources. Imagine what you can all do together: http://digitalelpaso.com