Power Failure in the Age of Technology

There is nothing more frightening in the 'Age of Technology' then the loss of power. We had a power outage last night that lasted for more than an hour. Other than reading a book on my iPhone I did not know what to do with my time? My kids where happy playing their DS's and iPods, bouncing back and forth with no pause. I was thinking alright How do I cook dinner without a microwave and an electric stove? I know I will go out to dinner, opps the power is out there too. Lucky for me the power came on before me electricity addiction killed me. But the ramifications didn't end there.

When I got to school the next day I had to deal with the entire network that crashed and was not coming up. Telling the teachers around the school that the network would be down for awhile drew stares of hate and horror that I haven't seen since my last visit to the dentist office. Has our society and education in particular become so attached to computers and the internet that they have a hard time working with out them? I grew up in the transition point where computer technology began to make in roads into education about the time I graduated from high school. Now 25 years latter education cannot function without computer technology. Don't believe me teachers? Try spending a week without using any technology.

I wouldn't even try, and not because it is my job, but because I have realized I have fallen behind the technology curve and would fall even more buy just losing a week. Your laughing at me now and calling me an over-reactor. I thought I was ahead of the curve with an IT Masters and working with IT everyday, but just attending ASTE this spring, a conference I haven't attended in 5 years, showed me how far I am behind. What is really scary is the speed at which society is changing. In less then 5 years I have gone from being on the curve to falling off the wave and so have all the teacher at my school.

Mt. Edgecumbe is a good school and promotes technology as one of strengths that makes it a good school. We have an overabundance of computers at our school, about 500 for 400 students, but they are only really being used for word processing and Internet research. Only one or two teachers have a web page, My Space is their enemy in class and not their friend, and most have never used Google Reader or Twitter as a research tool. BUT THE KIDS HAVE!!!! and they have been using them for several years. I feel like a drowning man on his third gasping breath drowning on the tidal wave of technology.

Question for the audience: Am I just getting old or is technology really advancing that quickly? Are we so dependent know that we could never go back? Is technology more addicting that heroin? Let me know.

Region V Basketball Tech

This week and last week have been now stop action for tech. Going from ASTE to hosting Region V Basketball Tournament, and all the communities that have radio stations to broadcast the games. To start I took something I learned from ASTE and created a Region V Basketball Site: http://sites.google.com/a/mehs.us/basketball/home . The reasoning for creating this site instead of using our own website is that I wanted to reduce the traffic to our network. We bought a VBrick Video Streaming device to stream the games. So we shoot the video of the game in Hi-Def and push the video to their webstreaming servers. So once again the traffic for the games will be directed through a higher speed server. Even with all this traffic being directed away from our local network we are still overloaded due to students, players, coaches and parents using our local network. Rather than cut the wireless, we talked to GCI and asked them if they could make sure the push video stream has a guaranteed 1 Meg through the firewall.

So why did we do this? We did this to provide the parents of students who attend MEHS and parents of the Basketball players who could not make it to Sitka to see the games. We feel that it is important to communicate with those parents in a positive manner, and this is one of those way we accomplished this. Please check out the site, the Video Feed and let me know what you think.

Another thing I took from ASTE and applied right away is the use of google docs. I made a real cool excel program that takes the scores from the games and moves the teams into their proper brackets. This uses some moderate excel code and the use of several worksheets. Just on a whim I uploaded it to google docs. Well google recognized the code and the multi worksheets with no problem. I thought cool now I can dump this on the mehs.us google site and it will work no problems because they are both from google. Wrong, educational domains from google cannot publish google docs outside their educational domain. So I spend several days figuring out how educational google domains and personal google accounts interact. The solution to publishing a google doc in an eductional google domain is to upload the doc to your personal google account and publish the document. Copy the URL and login to the educational google domain, insert a document and at the bottom there is an option for using a URL, paste it there. Then share the document to all the people who need to update the scores. There was a check box that updated the web every time the sheet is updated. So now my AD or Superintendent can update the website with out calling me after every game. So check out the Excel doc I created for the brackets: http://sites.google.com/a/mehs.us/basketball/scores-brackets

SO THANKS to all those presenters who showed me google docs and google sites.

Question to my audience: Go to the Region V site above and let me know what you think!

Post ASTE 2010

Alright now that I have overloaded on Tech, I need to do something with it. I mean it is one thing to see the new technology but another to actually use it. So for you that are following my experiences, please guide me if you see me heading for a pitfall and for those of you going through the same experiences please let me know you are there, and for those who learn something, please pass it on.

The main thing I will be doing this week is getting caught up on all the work orders that have piled up with both Greg and I being gone. After I get caught up I want to compile what I learned and present it to both Bill and Bernie (my bosses) and let them know what I have learned and what I would like to pass on to teachers.

The one thing I have learned from ASTE this year is how far behind I am in using Social Networking. My Principal has been pushing PLC (Personal Learning Communities) but I really think he should be pushing is Personal Learning Networks with Social programs like Twitter. I haven't attended ASTE in about 5 years, so I wasn't bored and learned a lot, thank you to any presenters who read this.

Question to the Audience: What is the best way to find people to follow and to gain followers in Twitter? What I am looking for is personal experiences of things that work and pitfalls to avoid.

Goals for this blog: I want to post to this blog at least 3 times a week. I will probably post more than that to start, but eventually I will shoot for 3 times a week.