Inspired by Scott McLeod’s Leadership Day and Tweets from andyjb and stephe1234 I’d like to announce the first annual Epic Tech Fail Day!

Designed as an effort to raise awareness about the importance of being digitally resilient in the 21st Century Classroom and to help teachers new to technology understand that even digital veterans have computer meltdowns, Epic Tech Fail Day authors should write short pieces about the struggles that they’ve had in their work with technology…and then share lessons learned from their disasters. 

Here’s a sample I wrote this morning.

Submission Details:

1. Get your contributions posted online before August 12th.
2. After posting your contribution, fill out this form so that I can find you easily.
3. If you’re Twittering, use #epictechfail as your hashtag so we can find your posts there, too.
4. Once all entries have been collected, I’ll link to the submissions here the Radical.
5. The five best submissions will win a free copy of my newest book, Teaching the iGeneration.

Topics You Might Write About:

Maybe you had a great video-based activity that went horribly wrong because all of the video cameras in your school decided to die at the same time—or a lesson built around digital photographs captured on cameras without USB cords!

Maybe you’ve fought the Flip Camera Codex battle—something that teachers in PC schools have grumbled about more than once in the past few years.  Maybe your class wiki project fell apart in a sea of vandalism from students who weren’t quite ready to take digital projects seriously. 

Maybe you’ve:

• Had the Internet go down more times than you can count when working with kids in the computer lab.
• Found it impossible to even sign up for computer time in your school!
• Stumbled across great sites, developed terrific lessons using new tools, and had all your work go to waste because of “the firewall.”
• Discovered at the last minute that the computers in your school weren’t compatible with the external tools that you were counting on your kids actually using.

If so, consider writing for Epic Tech Fail Day!  Making your struggles transparent will help others to understand that digital efforts aren’t easy—but that glitches aren’t failures in the eyes of a determined teacher.

One of the new bits of content that I’m going to start to create here on the Radical are short ‘epic tech fail’ bits that detail the digital disasters that I’ve had at school.

Now, the purpose of my Epic Tech Fail series isn’t to discourage you from using technology—I am a bit of a digital junkie, after all.

Instead, the purpose is to highlight the fact that good teachers who are using 21st Century tools have to be digitally resilient.  There are going to be glitches as schools wrestle with the need to keep students safe while exploring new ways to communicate and collaborate online.

There are going to be glitches as schools try to meet the infrastructure needs of 21st Century classrooms.  There are going to be glitches as teachers try to figure out how to blend what they already know about good teaching with what our students already know about new tools.

And we can’t quit every time things get glitchy!

Maybe you’ll learn something from my glitches.  Maybe you’ll see a common trap that you can avoid or take inspiration from the fact that even a guy buried neck deep in new tools is having troubles, too. 

Either way, they’ll be fun for me to write!

Here’s the first in the series:

Several years back, I stumbled across a new tool called Trailfire that allowed users to put together a collection of annotated websites into an organized tour—called ‘trails’—for others to explore. 

Convinced that it would be perfect for introducing students to sites that might help them to learn more about the topics we were studying in class, I made about a dozen trails over the course of one very long weekend—only to discover on Monday morning that Trailfire was blocked by my district’s firewall.

I blew a gasket. 

I emailed every tech-contact-y person I knew at the school and district level to let them know how frustrated I was that such a great tool was blocked.  I questioned their knowledge of digital tools and good teaching.  I told them that if they ever expected teachers to use digital tools in the classroom, they should stop blocking the tools we want to use.

And then I found the porn trails—tons and tons and tons and tons of porn trails—that Trailfire’s free users were creating.  With just a few clicks, I found tag clouds full of $%&* and @#$!%.  There were even trails about &*%$# and #$%@!.

It was shocking, and I don’t shock easily.  Heck, I didn’t even know that ##$%&* existed! 

(Why would anyone even want to do that?!)

Turns out the district folks knew what they were talking about after all.  I was definitely humbled and a bit embarrassed about my tirade. 

What lessons did I learn from my Trailfire Epic Fail?

Don’t jump feet first into a new tool until you’ve checked to see if it is blocked by your district’s firewall: 

My frustration with my Trailfire disaster is that I wasted an entire weekend putting together a dozen trails that I couldn’t use. 

It was the wasted time that bugged me—time that I wouldn’t have wasted if I’d just checked at school before starting my Trailfire projects.

Fully examine a new tool—especially one that offers free user accounts—before embracing it: 

If you know anything about me, you know that I’m Captain Cannonball, diving feet first into new tools without thinking a whole lot.  That explains the user accounts I have at about 50 services that I don’t even remember anymore.

What I don’t do, though, is spend much time poking around new service websites to see whether or not there are other users that are posting content inappropriate for my kids. 

Wouldn’t that make my life a bit easier?! 

The chances are good that if you’re using a ton of free tools, someone else is using the same tools to create &*%#@!.  Your job is to spot the sludge before blowing your top or wasting your time. 

Trust the district tech guys every now and then: 

I gotta admit it, I carry a professional chip around on my shoulder every time that a service I want to use is blocked.  “Those tech clowns,” I think, “have no clue.  If they knew SOMETHING about teaching, MAYBE they’d stop blocking the sites I want to use.”

Now it’s true that district tech guys aren’t always teachers by training, which results in a disconnect between the classroom and the firewall-blocking-decision-making-room, wherever that is.

But what tech guys DO know is how to keep kids safe.  The result:  Sometimes they make better decisions about new tools than even I can. 

So an interesting email landed in my inbox today.  Anita—an adjunct professor at Kent State and an admitted tech noobie—asked:

I teach an undergrad education course for preservice teachers (also some grad courses for teachers), and want my students to post threaded discussions.

I also need to upload files--both word and pdf, probably even ppts. Has to be a free site. I don't want to use vista or blackboard anymore, which is provided by the university.

I used nicenet. org for a focus group I ran (working on my doctorate), but it doesn't allow for uploading documents. Greatly limited in that way.

Any suggestions?

Here was my reply.  Figured it might be useful to you, too—regardless of the role that you’re filling:

Hey Anita,

Good to hear from you and glad that you're fooling around with online conversations for your students.  The more frequently that they get involved in those kinds of actions during their own education, the more likely they are to integrate digital conversations in their own classrooms.

A few years back, I facilitated a conversation between a good friend who teaches college classes here in Raleigh and her students on technology integration in the college classroom.

She was frustrated because she'd required students to post reflections on a class blog and then leave comments/have conversation with one another in the comment section of each post.

While she was excited about the project because it served multiple purposes---she wanted to introduce students to blogging and reflective thinking all at once----her students saw it as an extra task to pack in to an already full schedule.

The conversation became pretty animated when the topic of Facebook came up.  "If you watched what we're doing in Facebook," they pleaded, "you'd see that we're already having these kinds of reflective conversations! 

“Your site just feels like more work to us.  Why should we have to go to a special place to share thoughts about class when we can do the same thing on Facebook."

Interesting, huh? 

Her students weren't opposed to reflection OR to learning to use digital tools for meaningful conversations.  They were opposed to being forced into yet another community that they didn't have the time or energy to intellectually invest in.

What's the moral of the story?

The chances are great that your students are already Facebook users----most college students are, after all---and that they check their profile pages about a dozen times a day.  That means they're already comfortable with (maybe even excited about?) the tool. 

More importantly, Facebook is a daily web destination for them already---instead of a new place that they have to remember to visit----which increases the likelihood that they'll stop by the conversations that you create.

Now, I don't know whether or not Facebook is a great place for posting the other content bits that you're interested in posting----PowerPoints, documents, etc---simply because I don't use Facebook very often at all! 

If it DOES allow for that kind of content sharing, I'd say post away.  Keeping all of your content and conversations in the same place increases the efficiency of your class for your students, and efficiency is key in today's digital world. 

But if not, the best tool for sharing those kinds of materials---especially for someone new to digital tools---is Dropio (http://www.drop.io).  What makes Dropio unique is that you can make posts to your free website directly from your email inbox. 

So if you had a handout that you wanted to share with your students, you'd just attach it to an email message and send it to your site's email address---which is generated automatically by Dropio when you first create it. 

Cool, huh? 

Just like Facebook conversations are valuable to college kids because they're already familiar with Facebook, Dropio websites are valuable because they allow posts to be made directly from your email inbox----something that digital novices are already comfortable with.

Does any of this make sense? 

Basically, my argument is that the most successful digital efforts start with a knowledge of the kinds of tools that your prospective audiences are already invested in.  Why try to recreate digital communities using new tools if our students are already creating digital communities with existing tools?

Now, if your university won't allow you to use Facebook to interact with students---which is, unfortunately, a reality in many schools and districts across the nation---you can explore these popular services which look and feel a lot like Blackboard in action:

Ning (http://www.ning.com/):  Ning has become the tool of choice for educators interested in creating social networking sites for their classrooms and/or colleagues. 

Some of the best educator professional development sites are built from Nings---Classroom 2.0 (http://www.classroom20.com/) is probably the biggest example---and most districts don't block Ning sites. 

That means using Ning with your students will introduce them to a tool they can use in their own classrooms later.

Tapped In (http://tappedin.org/tappedin/):  Tapped In was one of the first social networking tools that I ever had the chance to play with and it remains a good free option for educators. 

While it is a bit clunkier than Facebook and Ning, it offers all of the common features---opportunities for asynchronous discussions, opportunities to post documents and materials----AND it makes instant messaging possible between class members that are in the same place at the same time.

Moodle (http://moodle.org/):  Moodle is another service that many schools and districts have embraced as a course management tool. 

While I've never used it, from what I hear, it's a free version of Blackboard.  Whether that's a good thing or not is something that you'll have to decide! 

The advantage of using Moodle is that your students will gain experience with a tool that's unlikely to be blocked by the firewalls in the districts that they go to teach in. 

Hope this helps!
Bill

If you’ve read the Radical for any length of time, you know that I’m a real digital junkie.  There aren’t many technologies that I haven’t explored and/or completely embraced, both in my professional and my personal life. 

While others—like my good friend Dina Strasser—are carefully thinking about the impact that technology is having on human interactions, I’m gleefully whizzing off to the gadget store to pick up the latest gizmo.

But for the past few years, I’ve started to wonder about the impact that digital solutions and services are having on privacy rights in our country.

I mean, think about it:  We’re slipping microchips into the backpacks and clothes of our sons and daughters so that we can track them if they get lost.  We use similar devices to get instant updates every time that our teens are speeding in the family sedan. 

We use Google Latitude to mark our locations so that our friends can find us easily with applications on their cell phones, we are Twittering out the bars and restaurants that we’re visiting, and we’re even sharing lists of everything that we buy. 

My guess is that the users of these tools and/or services are convinced that their lives are being improved by new digital solutions that we could only imagine “back in the day”—and there is some truth to that:  If my daughter is ever missing, I’d want to be able to track her down, too. 

But I’m also becoming convinced that our freewheeling approach to what we’re willing to share is leading to a carefree—even careless—attitude towards privacy.

That’s why we don’t get all fired up when Mark Zuckerberg—Facebook’s founder—changes privacy settings constantly on his service, often with the end result being that more people can see and know more about us—and our friends—than we ever intended. 

That’s why we don’t question Google’s desire to track every web search that we ever make while signed in to their service or the purpose of Microsoft’s Index.dat file, which keeps a record of every file that you open on your computer that can’t be erased without a special application. 

That’s why no one gets all riled up when our government asks Internet service providers to keep a two-year record of every website we visit and email that we send.

That’s why we never question our local grocery store’s decision to track every purchase that we make through our MVP cards—as long as they’ll give us cheaper bacon and a couple of juicy coupons when we check out!

Now, I get it:  There are legitimate reasons to embrace every one of these digital applications. 

Google can provide customized search results if you are willing to let them look closely at the information you’re interested in, Facebook can help you make new connections if everyone is completely transparent, and the government can track down criminals if they have access to every email ever sent by every person working online. 

Those are good things, right?

But what will the consequences of this casual attitude towards digital privacy be twenty years from now when kids who have been raised in an era of unprecedented openness become the lawmakers of a new generation?

That’s an interesting question that I’m not sure I have an answer for—but the pessimist in me worries that we might be unintentionally giving away a fundamental piece of who we are, and I’m not all that comfortable with that decision.

I also wonder whether these are the kinds of conversations that we should be having with students in the 21st Century.  If a part of our job is to develop responsible citizens, wouldn’t that include lessons centered around the difference between what we CAN do with technology versus what we SHOULD do with technology?

Does this make any sense?

In case you haven’t heard (some people still live in caves, you know), the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers lost LeBron James—a hometown boy with the potential to go down in history as one of the best players of all time—to the Miami Heat last week.

The media frenzy over LeBron’s decision has been pretty ridiculous, hasn’t it? 

Even today—days after LeBron’s decision was announced to fanfare in Miami and fires in Cleveland—I can’t go more than a few minutes without seeing a bit on the telly or hearing a bit on the radio about the entire fiasco. 

It’s frustrating for a guy like me who hasn’t watched an NBA game in 10 years, but it’s also instructive! 

That’s right:  Educators and the policymakers working hard to find ways to recruit teachers to high needs schools can learn a TON from the LeBronathon if they’re willing to look carefully and listen.

Here are three lessons I think we can learn from LeBron:

Talented people want to work in circumstances where they know that they’ve got a chance to succeed: 

One of the first lessons that policymakers working to staff high needs schools can learn from LeBron is that money is rarely the deciding factor when talented people are choosing where to work. 

I mean, think about it:  LeBron—in an era when athletes are literally rolling in cash and trying to outdo every new contract signed by their peers—could’ve made anywhere from $10-30 MILLION dollars MORE had he stayed with the Cavaliers or gone to the New York Knicks.

But money wasn’t the key factor in LeBron’s decision.  Instead, he wanted the chance to win a title—many titles, actually—and that meant moving to a team where he knew that he’d be ‘working’ with other remarkably talented players. 

That’s instructive, considering how often our efforts to recruit teachers to high needs schools are built on meager cash incentive plans. 

Most teachers that I know laugh at the nickels used to entice us to high poverty buildings—not because we aren’t thankful that someone recognizes that teachers deserve to be paid more for working in challenging communities, but because cash is the least of our worries.

Instead, we want to work for accomplished principals and with accomplished teachers.  There’s a professional synergy in a building that’s stacked with Amar’e Stoudamires and Dwayne Wades

(Jennifer Anistons, Mariah Careys, Robert Oppenheimers, Albert Einsteins, Elmos and Big Birds, for those of you who don’t watch hoop). 

We want to win, too—and we know that winning in a high needs building isn’t a solo act.  It’s dependent on the support of our peers—something that we’d happily trade bonuses for.

No one person is talented enough to turn around any enterprise 

Can you name even ONE other player who has played for the Cleveland Cavaliers in the past 8 years?

Right.  Neither can I.  They’re LeBron’s team.  He’s the King and everyone else isn’t even worth remembering.

But here’s the problem:  Even though they’ve had the services of a seriously remarkable talent for 8 years, the Cavaliers STILL haven’t won anything worth winning. 

Sure, they’ve had a few seasons of sold out games and made it into the paper a few times, but LeBron wasn’t enough to bring a title to a team and a city that has been pining for celebration for a really long time.

And now that he’s gone, that pining is going to get super painful!  After all, who is going to fill the hoop—and the seats—now that basketball’s Elvis has left the building? 

The fact of the matter is that the Cavaliers put all of their hopes in one person.  That’s poor planning at best and downright lunacy at the worst.

But it’s exactly what we do when we try to staff high needs schools, isn’t it?  “If only we could get Ron Clark to come and teach here, we’d have a chance at reaching every child!” we think.  “Look at what Rafe Esquith did in tough circumstances.”

Our poorest communities don’t need Ron Clarks or Rafe Esquiths, y’all.  They need broad coalitions of likeminded individuals that are working towards a shared mission and vision of excellent teaching and learning. 

That’s the only way to guarantee that a school continues to succeed even after their stars move on to other places and positions. 

Belittling and berating are really poor recruiting strategies 

My favorite person in the whole LeBronathon has been Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert, who blew a holy gasket after LeBron announced that he wasn’t coming back to his hometown team.

I mean, Gilbert’s rant is one for the ages:  He called LeBron a ‘former hero’ and his decision to move on a ‘heartless and callous action.’  He used the word ‘betrayal’ so many times in his email to fans that I’ll bet the Y-A-L keys are falling off of his computer today.

And in one of the best jabs at a former player ever, he reduced the price of LeBron James Fathead posters—a company that he owns—to $17.41. 

Why such an odd number? 1741 is the year that notorious US Traitor Benedict Arnold was born.

Now, I’ve gotta admit that I love a history driven hater—come on, did you think about 1741 when you were last betrayed?—but commentators are now arguing that Gilbert’s rant has done more harm than good for the Cavaliers. 

After all, what free agent is going to want to sign with a team where the owner has shown such open scorn towards talent? 

If you were a basketball player with the ability to choose between several different teams that all wanted your services, would you head to Cleveland to play in a community where hate has been spewed toward others with ability and opinions?

So why do we expect teachers to ‘sign with’ schools that we heap with scorn? 

Is it really a surprise that good people don’t want to work in places where they’re labeled failures by the community year-after-year?  Would you want to wake up every morning to stories in the paper about just how bad you really are and having your every intention and/or motivation questioned?

Didn’t think so.

And neither do many of our best teachers.  Instead, they’ll take their talents elsewhere because they can.

Altruism is a really poor recruiting strategy, too 

I’ve heard LeBron completely castigated more times than I can count in the last few days because he’s chosen to move away from his hometown team.  “That’s selfish!” Cleveland fans are crying.  “How could he possibly turn his back on us, knowing just how badly we need him.”

Well guess what, folks:  We’re ALL selfish, aren’t we?  Don’t we all look carefully at what’s in our best interest when we’re making major life choices? 

And if we weren’t, wouldn’t our wives and husbands be completely hacked off at us?!

Sure it would have been nice if LeBron had set aside his own interests to save the city of Cleveland—and sure it would be nice if our best teachers set aside their own interests to work in the most challenging buildings in our nation—but the last I checked, individuals still have the right to make their own choices in this here country.

If you really want to see high needs schools staffed by the best and the brightest, you’re going to have to rely on something more than altruism, hope and shame as your recruiting strategies.

What’s the moral of this story? 

Talented teachers are really no different than the most talented members of any profession.  We want to work in places where we know that we can succeed, we’re not driven by cash, we can’t reform schools all on our own, and belittling ain’t going to encourage any of us to move to more difficult buildings.

These aren’t difficult concepts, y’all. 

We just need to be as willing to apply them to our profession as we are to accept them when we see them demonstrated in other professions.