District Administration - September 2012 - (Page 84)

cio ing in terms of reading levels, ESE, ESL children, and how we could impact a school and its diversity. Our district is comprised of regions, and representatives from each region present their own boundary recommendations for the year. With this product, they can do many simulations. It also allows us to see where our students are. If we pull a boundary for a specific school, we can see just by little dots on the map all the children that live in the boundary of that school. We can see whether they are actually attending that school or other schools in the area, which may be choice programs and magnet schools. It allows us to track student-learning gains, see what’s working or what’s not working to provide a more individualized curriculum geared to a student area of interest or needs at the home school. We implement a lot of things people don’t want, trust me. This was one of the ones where we didn’t say, “You have to use it. You have to draw your maps this way.” It wasn’t even a sell. How much does Miami-Dade embrace one-to-one? Do you see the whole district going one-to-one soon? Karcher: One-to-one for our district, which has about 340,000 students, is a little daunting. And it’s really not going to happen without a BYOD technology model. We are going forward with trying to provide wireless in all our schools. This provides capacity for students to bring their own devices if they choose. One-toone is not sustainable in this district without some type of BYOD initiative. Last March we surveyed our students to try to figure out who has devices and if they would bring them to school. Our response rate was about 27 percent, so we will be repeating the survey, but 80 percent said they had their own device, and about 67 percent said that they would be willing to bring it to school, which leaves 84 September 2012 District Deborah Karcher checks information on the servers with David Burns, network analyst for M-DCPS. less of a group to try to give devices to. We are very excited about this. The School Board just approved a new revised acceptable-use policy that incorporates bringing your own device. We want children to use their technology, and we’re excited about it. So we do embrace it. We just can’t afford it in the way that maybe other districts have been able to do. I’ve been reading that you’re trying to expand the iPrep Academy, which is the M-DCPS technology-rich environment that combines online and face-toface classes encouraging inquiry and creativity. How hard will it be to turn the ship around? Karcher: If it’s not called iPrep it will be called something else. But it’s going to take some time. The demand for iPrep models is pretty high. But with BYOD, with teachers starting to move into that flipped classroom model, I think you are going to see shades of iPrep happening in different ways or in different clusters in our school district. In five years, could all schools in Miami-Dade be using some form of the iPrep model? Karcher: I think five years is a little bit aggressive. I would say five to 10, because from what I’ve seen from technology and new things, it generally takes three to five years just to really institutionalize technology. This is even bigger than that. This is a whole change in instruction and how we deal with our students. What’s one thing you wish MiamiDade had that it doesn’t have? Karcher: They say money’s not everything, but for us it is. We implement very well, and we are ready for wireless and for one-to-one. But a lot of our schools don’t have the wireless capacity and the number of devices we need to do that. It just comes down to a money issue. Of all the technology you have implemented, what’s one thing that you would never give up? Karcher: I would never give up our portal and our model for our portal. It allowed us to do a lot of things I don’t think other districts can do as easily. We did it piecemeal. This wasn’t something that was built in a couple years; it’s been built over 10 years. The superintendent embraced it and used it to do his Links to Learning initative. Links to Learning provides supplemental online curriculum content to support student learning with individualized student learning paths beyond the school day, enabling anytime learning. It is accessible to students via their portal and provides links to the appropriate software through single sign on. The portal is role based. It is specifically tailored for the teacher and their students, and it provides student academic information for multiple years and individual students’ achievement scores. It also flags individual students into categories that are color coded—red (needs major assistance), yellow (may require additional assistance) green (student is progressing). This model allows for a more personalized instructional program for our students. The parent portal provides our parents a way to communicate and see how their children are doing. It has allowed us to present our data on any device. That’s the key to one-to-one. —Judy Faust Hartnett District Administration

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - September 2012

District Administration - September/October 2012
Contents
From the Editor
Letters
News Update
Curriculum Update
Inside the Law
District Profile
Administrator Profile
Product Focus
Resistance to High-Stakes Testing Spreads
Postgraduation for Special Needs Students
Rick & Becky DuFour
CIo News
Getting the Best ROI in Technology
Shaping a Digital Decade
Professional Opinion
Professional Opinion
Online Edge
Going Mobile
New Products
New Directions

District Administration - September 2012