Shift to the Future

A friend of mine introduced me to the idea of delighting users of technology.  I don’t know about you but that is not always my experience when using a website, app, or some tech hardware. I bought an iPhone XR recently and I surprised myself.  I thought I would not care much about the facial ID feature – I was wrong.  It is a delightful experience.  Your messages are secure until you look at them.  You need to enter a password into a website, no problem, allow your face to grant access to your favourite password vault to send the password.  Similarly I now use Apple Pay with my VISA to tap and pay – again my face authorizes the transaction. Full disclosure, I’m a Microsoft fan.  Their CEO, Satya Nadella, has led a transformation and my opinion is that the result is a company that creates delightful software.  It may not start out that way but their change cadence, driven by agile and cloud computing, continuously (monthly) just makes software and...

I suspect that we all know of people who long for the simpler days of old.  Perhaps you are old enough to remember when a family had one telephone available to them, it was plugged into the wall, had a long curly cord, and you might have used it once or twice a day.  Now we have a phone, actually a super computer, in our pockets with us 24x7 and we interact with others possibly 100’s, for some maybe 1000’s, of times a day.  We try to keep up with the flows of our Facebook community, Twitter streams, Text messages, phone calls, Face Times, email messages, SnapChats, Pins, Skypes, etc.  It is overwhelming isn’t it.  Oh for the good ol’ days of the one phone, you know the one where you ‘dialed’ the number and hated numbers with “0” in them.  You know, when you had to wait when the party line was on a call.  That may be a simplistic example but with all our technological advancements there are benefits and consequences.  For those of us on this plan...

It’s a short but profound little question, “why?”.  Why influences a persons motivation to choose one path or thing over another.  In the book “ Start with Why ” by Simon Sinek that I’m currently listening to on my commute between Vancouver and Maple Ridge, the author introduces the golden circle ( watch the TEDx video ).  So many companies and individuals are focused on what they do and how they do it but miss the mark of why they are doing it.  In his book, Simon uses an example of when MP3 players came out.  Manufacturers would talk about what these did or had such as how many gigabytes, how long the battery would last, etc.  When Apple produced the iPod, they focused on why you would want one.  They described a lifestyle, talked about why you would want 1000 songs in your pocket, etc.  Once you were hooked, you would ask about what such as how much memory.  Apple wanted to change your life as you experienced music, not just sell you a...

I’ve learned a lot (through the school of hard knocks) about implementing technology for learning, teaching, and work.  I naively used to focus on the tools and the technical aspects without seriously considering the impact on people.  That was then and this is now.  Technology is very often the instigator of significant changes for people.  It should be, or what’s the point of buying and providing it?  Simply adding a new tool and carrying on with a current practice really doesn’t make a lot of sense does it.  We see this occur often in schools.  SMARTBoards, for example, often get a bad rap, perhaps unfairly.  We need to do implementation well! Principals will see or hear about how amazing these interactive whiteboards (IWB) work, then they buy and install some in their school and wonder why teachers don’t use them.  Or, worse, teachers do use them but in exactly the same way they used their overhead projector or the LCD projector they al...

My wife and I love to go for walks in the woods, by a river, lake, or the ocean, or take our bikes for a ride in a park.  I like to get out and hike mountains (nothing too serious), and mountain bike ride deep in the woods up in the mountains.  There is something surreal about being connected to nature, away from the distractions of our smartphones, computers, tablets, TVs, and PVRs.  Actually we don’t have a PVR or cable channel package.  Good ol’ rabbit ears and a $40 digital to analogue converter gives us about 6 decent channels of digital HD for free! But I digress…  I wonder what we as a culture, a society, have lost or given up, by being so intertwined with our technology.  It has literally invaded all aspects of our lives.  You might be wondering why I, a person so passionate about, amazed by, and engaged with technology would even be thinking this way.  Well, I like to consider all angles of most topics and technology is no exception....

The iPad has sure taken money from peoples pockets in a hurry.  I don’t know about you but I’m starting to find it difficult at times to make sense of all the choices.  School Principals and Teachers often seek my advice on what to buy for students or what to recommend to parents to buy for their kids.  I have to step out of my adult self to try to see device choices through the eyes of a young person.  We adults are biased in our choices to what we know and prefer.  Kids are often more willing to use / try new devices and make them work for their needs.  We need to be sure to acknowledge that they will see things differently then we adults do. I wrote a post about using iPod Touch devices in classrooms – we have some schools considering class-sets of these to support learning.  Many schools are considering netbooks as the next big thing for students. Their size and price are attractive for sure.  But aren’t they simply a smaller cheaper laptop...

In my last post I talked about a learning team I facilitated for school principals.  Well, I also facilitated a team of K-5 teachers last year in their journey to figure out how to use SMART boards .  This was a great experience for me to have with classroom teachers learning a new and powerful technology. SMART boards are interactive white boards (IWB) or devices that allow the user to touch the white board and manipulate objects, text, and various software tools.  It is best to mount the IWB on the wall with an LCD projector arm built in.  This way it is always available and properly aligned and calibrated – which reduces setup time and frustration for the teacher.  Then use a laptop (or desktop) on a cart to connect to the IWB.  Software on the laptop controls the IWB’s functions. Schools have embraced IWB’s all around the world.  I believe Alberta, CA has a goal to put an IWB in every classroom in every school and is well on its way to achiev...

Last year I had the privilege of facilitating a learning team consisting of a small group of school principals.  Learning teams in our District are learning structures designed to support action research.  These principals had recently purchased tablet PCs and had the following question: “In what ways will my leadership skills be improved by my learning the various tools of my tablet?”   They are leaders of elementary (K-5) and middle (6-8) schools. Learning teams are a very important method for our teachers and principals to experience embedded action research of their own design.  I presented their story at CUEBC in October 2009 .  We have over 1/3 of our educators who’ve chosen to be on a learning team and around 41% of all learning teams have a learning with technology focus.  I talked about technology leadership in a previous post and I think this group of Principals exemplify learning and leadership. Role of Principal and Technology They see the...

I was having lunch with @gary_kern recently and we talked about the difference between innovation for and adoption of technology in education.  Innovation involves creating something new, a method, a model, a thing while adoption is the implementation or use of a method, model, or thing.  Gary and I talked about what to call an innovation involving the educational use of technology.  Is it a model, a program, a project, or something else?  The question is, “what will help us take an innovation to full adoption within schools?”  Does it matter what we call it?  Will calling it something like “a program” help people more easily connect with and adopt it? When talking about an innovation, we often talk about it being transformative or causing a transformation.  For example in our School District we often refer to laptops for students in a one laptop per student configuration (embedded use of technology) as transformative to their learning.  Anot...