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.

I am in Dallas staying at Hotel Indigo with a group of technology directors from around the state. The purpose of this is to learn how to be a Technology Director. TCEA is providing a 5-day technology directors academy with the dates spread year-round. This week’s sessions are the first two in the five day rotation. I know from my colleagues who are not attending that there is some interest in what we are doing here so I am happy to share about it as much as I can. I won’t get into it all because there is something to be said about attending one of these instead of just reading about it.

First, I want to say that I highly recommend this academy. It has been presented very well with a lot of information that could be very boring but presented in a way to make it interesting and interactive. We have learned about finance, state requirements, and the laws surrounding technology. We have been invited to collaborate and share web resources as well. Mixed into our group are educators and technology directors who have no classroom experience. It is REALLY interesting to hear the “ooohs” and “aahhhhs” from classroom educators next to the silence of our non-classroom experienced colleagues when seeing some really cool teacher tools. ha

A quote from Monday’s 1st session that really hit me was “You are the visionary for your district. Your job is to be visionary.” This is such a costly burden for many of us. I know I was hired for my vision but as I learn more and more about my responsibilities, I wonder when I will have time to develop a vision or to even collaborate with others to put vision into practice. I have worked with other technology directors in my time and I wonder what vision they had other than “to block all the sites I use”.

I hope I can remain the district visionary while keeping up with all the behind-the-scenes work. We discussed building the BHAG (Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal) for our district and then developing the smaller goals below that one. The visionary looks from the mountain when their BHAG is met and can see how they built the mountain through all the goals to build up to it. I believe this comes from the book “Built to Last” and “Good to Great” both by Jim Collins. These books were recommended reading as well.

We were given a thumb drive full of resources for us to use for Budgeting, FISH, NETS, Planning, Budgeting, Team Building, Law, and a lot more. These resources included PDFs, videos, Power Points, and all sorts of document resources that are working and in use in districts across the state. We had input from other technology directors in the state who gave great information about how to work with the community and how to get support. Very good resources not only in the meeting but in our discussions as well.

Day 2 has started so I will take further notes and reflections on it.

Again, I highly recommend this academy for the new technology director and for the experienced one. We have a few in here who are repeat academy attenders who say they come every few years to get new resources and they are impressed each and every time.

Miguel dropped the glove and asked me to post my comments on what happened at Day 2 of TEC SIG. I honestly did not take many notes on the day because…well….I got caught up in making fun of the situation on Twitter. It happens.

So what happened? Well, that’s hard to figure out. I haven’t been into all the gab on the TEC-SIG listserv. I mainly check it when I get an interesting topic or I post a question about something I would like a response to.

I didn’t know there was this growing debate between TEA and the SIG. So from an outsider’s view like my own it looked like a fight was developing in that session on Friday.

I think I can see both sides of the arguments that took place. Sparing the nitty-gritty, here is what I think:

1) The reps from TEA tried to “school” us in proper netiquette by informing the group that information shared by them is copyrighted and that we should ask permission before posting it online or posting it on our own blog/podcasts.

2) They then told us that they were too busy, understaffed, and unprepared for dealing with the new technologies of Web 2.0. We even heard that often they send out information that is changed by the time it is sent out.

3) Audience members who do podcast and share these resources were seeking clarity on copyright when posting resources sent by TEA (which is a public entity).

My thoughts on this:

1) TEA should really take advantage of the people who are willing to post their information in easily explainable terms. I know that if I have a question on something, I ask TEC-SIG or I read the blogs of others. I rarely visit TEA’s site or ESC-service centers. I can’t find information as easily as on others sites.

2) People who do blog/podcast on their sites should (even as a courtesy) ask for permission to record word for word or to post the slides from a presentation. It is a professional courtesy that I think has fallen to the wayside. I agree that they are a public entity and we should get the information from them to post. But I also think it is a courtesy to inform them in advance that you wish to record them. I do the same for all guest speakers and meetings I wish to record.

TEA should provide a better communication system for distributing information along with some interactivity on their site. I agree. But as they say, they are understaffed as well. It sounds like they need help with this and my question is why can’t TCEA help them? Why can’t we as an association provide the tools to distribute information more than just conference advertising?

The one place I think we should look to for technology information in the state should be linked to TCEA somehow. We keep talking about providing a database of all of our district resources and vendors with small steps heading that way. What is our organization about besides a listserv and a conference each year?

Better yet, what are my dues for in this group? What am I paying for?