The TWAIN blog

Today I added myself to the list of people running for the Area 20 TCEA Board Member position. Currently, I know of two others who are running for the position as well: Jennifer Faulkner of Alamo Heights ISD and Miguel Guhlin of San Antonio ISD. Those two names alone make this an even more daunting run for me. I almost pulled out of the race after hearing that they were running for the position.

Jennifer has served as the R20 TCEA board member and there are no complaints from anyone. She has done an outstanding job and I look forward to seeing her in meetings we attend. She is organized and offers great ideas in our area technology directors meetings. She also is a great resource and has answered many questions I have sent her way. Being a newbie to this CTO job, I have to rely on people for help. Jennifer has been a great help to me and I really appreciate that! Her humor is right up my alley as well and I like that she makes me laugh during meetings.

Miguel is a blogger extraordinaire! He is also the most prolific TEC-SIG listserv Q&A guy. He is really plugged in to the resources we all need and he has such fantastic ideas on technology resources for educators. He is an encyclopedia of tech-knowledge! Plus, he is progressive and a change-agent. You can read his blog post for his ideas on change, especially for our association. I support his goals for change in our association. Plus, Miguel forces me to continue blogging when I get so frustrated with it. He encourages me to share in my voice and to be an honest blogger which is really encouraging to me.

But enough about them….

The nomination form to drop my name in the hat allowed me 50 words to post my ideas on what I could bring to the TCEA Board. It felt like a Twitter post and it really did not allow me to share what I believe I could bring to the executive board.

I am new blood but I feel great responsibility within our association. If you attended the TCEA 2009 Convention and the opening keynote, you may have heard my blog post read to the entire audience that reflected my history and feelings about TCEA. There is a family history with the association and I have been raised by a steady group of inspirational leaders in the TCEA community. I believe we need to honor the past as we develop the future.

The sad news is there is a division in the association about the pace of change and implementation of transparency in both TCEA and TEA. It has spurned interesting online discussions, uncomfortable group gatherings, and has developed factions within the larger body of the association. These are symptoms and results of change. It is a the classic battle between tradition and innovation; to which both have relevance on the path to change.

But it is separating our association rather than doing what I would like to see my TCEA do: unify all of our efforts. TCEA must unify its stakeholders and resources to develop as THE state resource for Educational Technology for students, teachers, administrators, and support specialists.

I look at the SAIL ON initiative that is uniting seven Houston area districts in a common goal of providing online interactive lessons for all subject and grade levels in the state. I see this and I wonder why I can’t find that type of resource in the TCEA association. This is a group of districts pooling their resources together to share with the rest of the state. Why can’t I find a list of resources like that on the TCEA website?!

I visit Wisconsin’s IDE@S site which is devoted to providing “interactive dialogue with educators across the state”. Do we have this on the TCEA website? I guess the listservs provide that service to a small degree. But I have to use Facebook, Twitter, email, listservs, podcasts, wikis, and blogging to really have interactive dialogue with educators these days. To be connected to my professional learning community, I have to be a member in over 10 different social networking sites! My interactive dialogue consists of reading timelines of events that happened while I was working. God forbid I skip a day!

To engage in interactive dialogue in TCEA, I have to go to their NING site which is fairly new and promoting the one week conference lasting 5 days. What about my other days? Must I make a Second Life profile to engage in interactive dialogue? Is there a TCEA island?

I read (sometimes) the blogs of educators across the state asking questions and facing the same issues. We are all facing the same problems and finding similar solutions. But are we running to TCEA’s website for the solutions or are we running to Google? The TEC-SIG daily digest is full of repeat answers to repeat questions. We all want to know what is the most recommended CIPA filter and if anyone can share an RFP for this given service.

I am convinced that if you were to layer all of our district instructional technology pages on top of each other to measure the number of similar links and ideas, you would see that we are almost all linking to the same resources.

And we are all making training videos and documents for our teachers. We are all creating the same newsletters; sending the same virus warnings; proclaiming the need for proper cord management; and declaring the sanctity of open record emails. We are spending time and money on tools to make instructional and promotional materials for teaching the same integration tools.

Don’t even get me started on our wikis! Do we all have them? Are they so different? And do we really need a different wiki for every topic or convention idea?

We are all under the same guidelines of the mandates of TEA, NCLB, the Fed, etc.; but we are all inventing the same wheel over and over again. We are chasing our tails when we should be paving the roads for future teachers to rely on our organization for all their technology integration resources.

I am still fairly new to our TEC-SIG meetings where TEA representative share changes in legislation and requirements. I’ve been to a few meetings but I am pretty clear in understanding that they are overwhelmed and can’t be the educational technology repository for the state. I don’t think it is fair to require TEA to be this for us. The skillset isn’t there.

We need to work with TEA and relieve them of this tremendous burden. We, as the state computer education association, have the skills to do this. We are an association built of members with such skills! You can see for yourself in all of our bloggers, podcasters, digital storytellers, GIS hunters, open source renegades, webmasters, etc.; we are an untapped resource and a necessity to become THE resource for education in Texas. Our association can be the pattern for 49 other states and even to other nations.

This is my platform for running for the Area 20 representative to the TCEA Board. My goal is to tap into the greatest resource within the association and that is the membership of the association. We need to hear not only from our most vocal members about their ideas for change; we also need to give voice to those in our state who are so overwhelmed they can barely breathe. My platform supports both Miguel and Jennifer in their efforts to also lead in the TCEA Board. I would hope that should either of them win, they will take into consideration my voice and yours as well.

The association needs all of our voices. Voting is one way to provide voice and I hope you provide that in the elections.

As Twitter has surged in popularity, there have been many stories circulating about how people found answers to questions/complaints within a short amount of time. I have always been amazed at these stories but never really experienced it for myself….until yesterday.

We had a board meeting this week and a board member requested a service to show the policy adjustments from TASB and LOCAL documentation in a way similar to a revision history. The board member described it as a type of transparent overlay to see how the document changes per draft. I know that this can be done by using Word and strikethrough tools but we were looking for something a little more automated.

So…I posted on Twitter: “Any ideas? Trying to find a quick method for viewing TASB policy changes in one document. One file showing all revisions made in three clix.” Within 90 minutes, I received an email from Marvin Long in TASB Policy Services asking me to verify that I was the “mradkins” who posted the question on Twitter. I verified and received instructions on exactly what we needed to do to download this documentation directly from TASB.

We did not need to do anything on our end except login and download the files from TASB. They already have this on their website available for download. I have their instructions posted below if you would like to share with your Superintendents.

I am amazed at how quickly this was handled. I didn’t even have time to ask the question on our TEC-SIG listserv where I would need to wait at least 12 hours for most of the responses. I didn’t hash-mark the TASB question on Twitter either; which usually links it directly to the organization. Marvin informed me that the TASB Communications Director has been very proactive in monitoring Twitter for TASB mentions. Great job! She found me and directed my post to the right person!

All in all, I am still amazed at how great Twitter is working for finding information so quickly. Yesterday I was able to mention to my CTE Director the instant information posted by TEA on Twitter about CTE articulation happening at that moment. I am really pushing the idea of Twitter to my admininstrators to show how instant information is being passed around. With yesterday’s example, it is getting easier to share.

Information is literally at my fingertips and I think that may frighten people….well….until they become Twitter addicts themselves.

Anyone else out there with a personal Twitter experience like this?

Here is the information for viewing draft revisions to board policy:

1. Go to TASB.org
2. Log into their myTASB accounts
3. Access the Policy Service Resource Library and then click a utility called Local Manual Updates.

This will allow them to download documents pertaining to updates of board policy, including a file called “(LOCAL) Policy Comparison.” This PDF file contains annotated copies of the local policies in a given update.

Anyway, by means of Local Manual Updates, the superintendent’s office can retrieve a PDF containing annotated local policies and distribute that to the board, if that’s what’s desired.

On the other hand, if you’re not satisfied with TASB’s proposed text and want to make further changes of your own, you can also download (again from Local Manual Updates) a zipped archive containing the proposed new local policies in Word. These are not annotated. However, you can make your own annotations in a couple of ways:

· You can perform a document comparison of your own between the proposed new policy and a copy of your current local policy (perhaps downloaded from Policy On Line).

· You can use the track changes feature in Word to automatically annotate your own changes. (Combine these two methods, and you can show a combination of TASB’s proposals and your own changes.)