• Reasonable, standards-aligned assessments

• Choice in technology, allowing schools to design hardware and software solutions that best meet their particular needs

• Requirements first, then platform, then (and only then) hardware

• Technology that solves problems for schools and enhances teaching and learning, rather than technology for the sake of technology.

I've been a fan of Dell hardware for many years, and have deployed more than my share of Dell machines. My current primary tablet is a Latitude 10 Essentials (its Windows 8 tablet targeted at schools). My geek heart is filled with gadget lust for its new XPS 18 super-tablet. I'm no fanboi, though. I'm typing this on an HP mobile workstation that rocks out loud and is my main computer. Various members of my family use everything from a Lenovo desktop to an Acer laptop to chromebooks to MacBook Pros, and I've had good luck with all of them (and more) in education settings. What really continues to impress me about Dell is how educational pain points are driving its products, services, and solutions, rather than simply shoehorning its existing enterprise stack into schools.

The Latitude 3330 is a great example. The aforementioned Latitude 10 is already a solid tool for schools and works well for 1:1, younger students, and teachers. However, the upcoming Common Core-aligned assessments being rolled out in many states in 2014, all of which are administered electronically, need an easily managed testing environment, especially in schools that can't afford 1:1 or extensive, elaborate labs. So Dell did a couple of things:

• Put together a team of former teachers and school CIOs, who developed a framework for assessing district readiness for these exams

• Made sure that schools could leverage existing hardware, tablets (including the Latitude 10) if it suited their situation, or low-cost, highly manageable laptops like the 3330

• Outlined a use case with its new Mobile Computing Cart to support the new assessments with a turnkey mobile testing environment; schools where space, funds, or other resources are an issue can roll a set of the 3330s into a classroom or testing site, fully charged and centrally configured, potentially using Dell's simple KACE management tools to save time for IT and instructors

• Added cost-saving, performance-improving hardware like hybrid hard drives, so students can get to work quickly and on hardware that schools can afford.

If it sounds like I'm raving about Dell here, I am. Other OEMs should be following its lead in taking very realistic, hands-on, problem-driven approaches to student computing. For their part, schools shouldn't be rushing to make 1:1 happen at all costs (although I think most of us agree that 1:1 is both the ideal and the goal). I've seen schools lay off good teachers to fund technology implementations. However, when OEMs respect the real-world budget, time, and resource constraints facing most schools, then it becomes much easier for schools to find solutions for providing technology to students without sacrificing art, music, sports, or even entire teacher positions for the sake of technology that may end up underutilized anyway without the right training, use cases, and learning platforms.

The bottom line is that the 3330 is great, but what's greater is that schools can make tablets available where appropriate, laptops can be available where physical keyboards are still necessary or 1:1 becomes cost-prohibitive, or desktops/thin clients can be deployed where lab space is easier to come by than money. Computers are just a tool, albeit valuable tools that are also now required for a growing number of assessments. As always, it's the students and teachers who need to come first, supported by the best tech for the job (and not just the tech that many people think students automatically need without fully assessing).

The Ed-Fi solution is a universal educational data standard and tool suite (unifying data model, data exchange framework, application framework, and sample dashboard source code) that enables vital academic information on K-12 students to be consolidated from the different data systems of school districts while leaving the management and governance of data within those districts and states. Ed-Fi components act as a universal translator of academic data, integrating and organizing information so that educators can start addressing the individual needs of each student from day one, and can measure progress and refine action plans throughout the school year.

I recently covered InBloom, a project designed to provide a framework for the integration of disparate educational data sources that is also laying the groundwork for far easier access to student data for educators and policy makers on the ground. Interestingly, InBloom is actually using Ed-Fi technology as its intake mechanism for a variety of data. For more than a few reasons, education has run several years behind the rest of the technological universe in its adoption of serious data management and analytics tools, even though the education sector arguably has the greatest need for such tools to improve student achievement and educational accountability. These two companies are quickly dragging education kicking and screaming into the 21st century, where big data reigns.

Actually, though, according to Fey, there isn't too much kicking or screaming. Because Ed-Fi includes sample dashboards and a well thought out underlying framework for data integration, rollouts at state and local levels have gone faster than expected and teachers are already gaining access to powerful dashboards built on the technology. The Ed-Fi Alliance is also helping states share the software it has developed for data integration, custom dashboards, etc, around the Ed-Fi framework, making future adoptions easier. For example, if a state has integrated Ed-Fi with an existing Cognos data warehouse, the code will be accessible by other states using Cognos, significantly lowering barriers to adoption.

Fey also noted that some states are using Ed-Fi as a reason to rebuild their existing data stores around the standard. However, because the standard and tools are all XML-based and free to license, such rebuilds have been unnecessary for states and districts happy with their current systems. Publicly accessible technical documentation is extremely robust already, with everything from a complete data handbook to UML diagrams of the "Unifying Data Model" to a sample SQL Server script for creating an empty Ed-Fi database.

The data model itself is also quite complete with structure that accommodates drill-down from macro-level state data to individual student data, inclusive of special education and even extracurricular activities. I'm a data geek at heart, so I get more excited than most folks by XML schemas and data dictionaries, but it's hard not to be excited at the possibility of finally being able to compare apples to apples at the national level while still providing teachers and local administrators with easily accessible student-level data, all through the same framework.

Data management is never a simple thing, especially with the sorts of heterogeneous data sources we tend to accumulate in education. However, at a recent Dell event I had a chance to see Dell's Next Generation Learning Platform in action briefly and talked about the interaction of InBloom with this sort of software. Layering on Ed-Fi's framework for managing and accessing student data from the classroom to the state levels starts bringing us far closer to the vision of analytics in education that many educators and policy advocates have been talking about (but not seeing) for too long.

Author's note: The Ed-Fi Alliance and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation (of which Ed-Fi is a wholly-owned subsidiary) are not affiliated with Dell, although there are clearly some synergies; I referenced the Dell event and their Next-gen Learning Platform as an example of the sorts of ecosystems that can grow around the right approaches to student data. InBloom is also an entirely separate entity from Dell, Ed-Fi, or the MSDF, but, again, InBloom's efforts are clearly related, relevant, and actually leverage Ed-Fi technology for some aspects of data management.

But wait a second. Why should 10th graders (or sixth graders for that matter) need to know about big data and analytics? And if they do, why use Tableau? Both questions are actually pretty easy to answer. In terms of why we should be teaching analytics (not just analytical thinking but formal analytics):

• Data analysis, management, and interpretation will arguably be the most critical skills students today face in the coming decades. In a time when rote knowledge is becoming increasingly useless, the ability to draw meaningful conclusions from floods of data will have applications across all industries and areas of life.

• Analytics, as it turns out, give us some of the easiest ways to integrate math and science across curricular areas. The possibilities for math instructors to co-teach units with an analytic component in both the social and hard sciences are pretty extraordinary.

• Analytics isn't just about math. It's about the interpretation and presentation of data in compelling ways. Thus, even for students who struggle with mathematics or fail to see its relevance can contribute meaningfully to design, messaging, persuasion, written interpretation, and other areas where the chance to connect engaging activities with real-world math and critical thought are easy to find.

• Teaching analytics works best with real, relevant data from any number of sources. These skills can be taught with everything from flu outbreak information to housing prices to geological survey data.

And why Tableau?

• It's free for students and teachers. The company just opened up the product to educational users last week:

Tableau Software today announced that it will make its flagship visual analytics product free to students currently enrolled at an accredited K-12 institution, college or university worldwide. Tableau for Students is a new program that provides licenses of Tableau Desktop Professional to students to enhance their studies and gain new skills. Tableau Academic Programs also include the Tableau for Teaching initiative, which offers educators software for their classrooms. Students should visit http://www.tableausoftware.com/academic/students to obtain a free product code and will be asked for information to verify their student status at an accredited institution.

• It's easy. There are sample datasets and reports included with the software, and information can easily be visualized by dragging and dropping "dimensions" (categories or groupings of data), "measures" (the variables), and "parameters" (fields for subgrouping data) into a straightforward visual interface. Point to a data source, drag and/or define fields, arrange the fields in rows and columns, and choose the visual output. That's it. Even English teachers could do it.

• It's professional software. This isn't dumbed-down software for kids. It's the real tool used for data analytics by everyone from The New York Times to Charles Schwab.

This is an incredible opportunity for schools to change the way students think about data and the information-driven world in which they live. It's also one heck of a potential catalyst for schools to really begin integrating STEM education with the rest of the curriculum. Focusing on STEM is all well and good, but making STEM an integral part of what schools do and demonstrating that, regardless of a student's individual interests, there are clear applications for math and science is far better.

These statistics are actually pretty ridiculous. We focus on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) in many of our conversations, but actual programming rarely enters the picture. We give students iPads and various devices, and promote 1:1 to meet the "technology" component, but programming itself is a novelty for most schools in K12. We know that college grads with computer science degrees are going to get good jobs, but we don't let students explore CS meaningfully in high school so that they have an interest in pursuing a related degree in college. And those of us who live, eat, and breathe business and technology know that applied science, engineering, and mathematics all rely on programming and the algorithmic thought it teaches, but the College Board even dropped its second-level "AB" computer science AP test five years ago due to lack of interest.

Code.org has attracted interest from some of the biggest names in technology and politics. Mark Zuckerberg, as quoted on Code.org, perhaps sums it up best from an employment perspective:

Our policy at Facebook is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find. There just aren't enough people who are trained and have these skills today.

From an educational perspective, Bill Gates hits the nail on the head (also speaking in support of Code.org and its efforts):

Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains.

In fact, the high-profile supporters of Code.org range from Marc Andreessen to Max Levchin (co-founder of PayPal). Their message comes together in a video released today, produced by Lesley Chilcott of An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman fame. You can watch the full video on Code.org, but here's a teaser:

The take-home message is that we need to act now on a problem that, perhaps more than any other, impacts our ability to be competitive in the 21st century. For all of our standardized tests and talk about STEM, teaching programming (which can be an ideal catalyst for addressing every part of STEM and can be taught across all of our other curricula as well) is a novelty and an afterthought.

Is there a good reason why we couldn't make our standardized tests in mathematics programming projects with rubrics and requirements that require students to apply algebra, geometry, number sense, and every other standard in the Common Core? The answer is "of course not", and a test like this would be infinitely more useful in evaluating master than the current nonsense that only manages to evaluate how well our students take tests.

Is there a good reason that we shouldn't accept programming courses for language credit? Or math credits? Or with a bit of creativity, health, English, or history credits? Here's a course description for a United States history course that would work quite nicely (and be an incredibly fun class to take and teach):

In this course, US101, you will learn the events that led to the US Civil War, beginning with colonization, moving through the development of industry and agriculture on the East Coast, and examining the effects of westward expansion and the idea of manifest destiny. In addition to readings, in-class lectures, and original research, you will complete the following three projects in the co-required computer science lab course, US101CS:

• Model population growth and decline using Maple in the first 50 years of colonization, choosing to examine New England, the Mid-Atlantic, or the Southern Colonies

• Create a choose-your-own-adventure game using HTML and JavaScript in which users see the results of choosing an industrial career in a major East Coast city or an agricultural path in Tennessee in the early 19th century

• Create an interactive iPad app that teaches elementary school students about the development of agriculture in the South that perpetuated the perceived need for slaves.

I'm not a history teacher. I just made this up. The point is that a concerted effort on the part of teachers and curriculum stakeholders could bring us incredibly engaging curriculum that takes a 21st century approach to learning that is appropriate and adaptable for all students. It isn't rocket science, and it's barely computer science. Watch and share the video on Code.org and speak out on the really fundamental shift we need to make STEM more about the real world and less about paying lip service to teaching 21st century skills.

First, a bit of background. Congressman Honda represents the California Congressional District that encompasses Silicon Valley. He spent 30 years as an educator and before I launch into the vitriol, I applaud his ongoing focus on education, civil rights, STEM, and the development of a 21st century economy. Good stuff, all of it. However, this report, meant to be inspiring and galvanizing, leaves me feeling even more jaded and pessimistic about the future of education in this country.

To be clear, the actual text of the report isn't available yet. It's being presented to Secretary of Education Duncan later today. However, the materials coming out of Congressman's Honda's office, including the forward to the report, do nothing to suggest that our government has any ability to affect real change in our educational system. Five years ago, Congressman Honda introduced legislation to form the Citizens' Commission on Educational Equity "to convene a commission to examine and propose solutions to the inequalities and present in the public education system". Oooh, good idea...let's form a commission to propose some solutions.

Ultimately, the Office for Civil Rights within the Department of Education funded the Commission to the tune of $200,000 in FY2011 and $500,000 in FY2012. Relatively speaking, this is loose change that can be found in the seat cushions of the House and Senate. When you're trillions of dollars in debt, less than three-quarters of million dollars isn't worth batting an eyelash, right? Mitt Romney paid well over twice that in taxes in 2011.

Then again, that meta analysis I mentioned earlier would have been free and probably would have come to the same conclusions. Before we get to the conclusions, though, let's see what $700,000 bought us, shall we? According to Congressman Honda's office, for the low, low price of $700k, we got

• "Six town hall meetings across the nation to hear from students, parents, teachers, and local community members on their experience with the public education system"
• "Six [Commission] meetings to hear expert testimonies and engage in discussion and deliberation around the issues"

Wow. Twelve whole meetings. And they talked to actual people in six of them! And experts in six more! Actual experts!

But wait, it gets better. 

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But wait, it gets better. Here's a few bites from Congressman Honda's forward to the document:

• "...This is a declaration of an urgent national mission: to provide equity and excellence in education in American public schools once and for all."
• "We present a big and bold new vision on the federal role in education by recommending transformations in school funding structures, implementation of vibrant early education programs, and a commitment to a stronger investment for teacher preparation and retention in the field."
• "This game-changing report embraces the urgent truth in education reform: that parity is not equity."

And here's what a few stakeholders had to say about the report:

• "This report offers a cautionary note about the consequences of our anemic and regressive support for education." -NAACP
• “Through much debate and deliberation, this report presents a blueprint for how to guarantee that each child has a fair shot at the American Dream.” - Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University
• "[This report] notes that we cannot achieve educational excellence for all our children without addressing the educational, physical and social and emotional needs of our most vulnerable children. America must do what we do in our best schools in all our schools, for all our students. - American Federation for Teachers

Really? It took two years, an act of Congress, and a panel of experts to agree that we should, really for sure, provide equitable educational opportunities for all of our students? That schools should follow best practices? That we need to make sure kids feel safe and have enough to eat so they can learn? My 10-year old could have told them that for a hell of a lot less than $700,000. This is not rocket science.

The problem will be implementation. Sure, this document is being heralded as a blueprint. But blueprints aren't worth the paper on which they're printed if we don't build anything from them. Does anyone actually believe that real reform, the right funding, and better policies that promote wonderful teaching in urban, rural, and suburban schools will come out of this document? Where is the legislation that implements these recommended reforms or that addresses this "cautionary note"?

And not to pick on the NAACP, but if all we get is a "cautionary note" out of this report, then, again, we should have looked at the vast body of literature, grassroots efforts at reform, begging parents, screaming teachers, and disillusioned students for our "note of caution." Give me a break - We're a long way past caution. We should be in full-on crisis mode with policy makers taking immediate, unified action. But we aren't and they won't. Congress can barely agree that we should pay our bills, let alone bring education in this country to the levels seen in other countries around the world. We're too mired in bureaucracy and political game playing to do more than create an advisory committee to form a commission to write a report.

I think this process suggests just what's going to come of the Commission's report. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. But I bet the report will be nicely bound in Arne Duncan's office. Super. I wonder how many other reports are lining the shelves of his office while dropout rates skyrocket, teens enter college (if they're lucky) woefully unprepared for the coursework, and the rest enter the workforce with no reasonable vocational training to compete in a global marketplace for even skilled labor jobs.

Keep your report and give us some workable legislation or step aside and get out of the education business entirely. Because "Ed Reform" hasn't accomplished much more than turn our students into solid test-takers. You'll have to forgive me if I don't have much faith in this latest "blueprint" for actually creating the equity and opportunities it identifies.

In all seriousness, though, the LEGO World exposition opens in Copenhagen today and the company is announcing its next-generation Mindstorms robotics set, called the EV3. LEGO has already made some really significant contributions to STEM education through their Mindstorms program with countless robotics teams, competitions, collaborative class activities, and even adventurous kids who have created thousands of robots and learned to program, all while building with LEGOs (actually sophisticated TECHNIC elements, but they're LEGOs at heart). EV3, though, is a quantum leap forward in functionality from both a hardware and software perspective and a partnership with Autodesk lets users view in 3D how the primary models are constructed.

The third-generation set focuses on combining ease of use with far greater creative flexibility and new means for programming and controlling the robots. As with a growing number of educational tools, the point is creativity and critical thought rather than trying to figure out how to stick LEGOs together (hence, the Autodesk partnership, which provides a very useful means of illustrating building skills so that students can get down to the robotics. For the first time, LEGO is also including non-verbal, illustrated paper instructions for all of the suggested robots for learners who respond better to visual cues.

Aside from more sensitive sensors, embedded Linux in the much faster control module, and additional power capabilities, the robots can be controlled via mobile apps. Both Android and iOS are supported and they can be given either voice or touch-based commands.

Users of previous generation systems will find a similar programming interface; new users will see an object-oriented interface that looks a lot like Scratch (Scratch and the original Mindstorms software were both developed by Mitch Resnick at the MIT Media Lab). New and old users alike, though, will find a lot to like about the latest Mindstorms set. There are few products on the market today that can match the creative and educational potential of some very serious LEGOs.

inBloom, which launched this week, is hoping to change that. I had the chance to talk with Iwan Streichenberger, CEO of inBloom, Inc., and couldn't help but be impressed with both the current platform and the future vision of the non-profit. inBloom offers a set of technologies and services, most notably robust APIs, that allow single sign-on and aggregation of data from many web-based educational tools and provide a basis for companies to develop new solutions for schools, teachers, parents, and students that are interoperable without needing to conform to arbitrary standards or conventions. As the company put it in their press release,

The inBloom data integration and content search services enrich learning applications by connecting them to systems and information that currently live in a variety of different places and formats, while helping to reduce costs for states and districts. This comprehensive view into each student’s history can help those involved in education...act quickly to help each student succeed. It also helps educators locate standards-aligned instructional resources from multiple providers and match them with their students’ needs...

Additionally, the inBloom framework enables technology providers to develop and deploy products without having to build custom connections to each state and district data source. This means more developers will have the opportunity to create new and powerful applications to benefit students, with lower implementation costs and faster time-to-market. 

For example, an SIS provider could build a custom dashboard with student data from any application connected to inBloom. 22 such providers have already signed on to connect their applications to inBloom and 9 states are involved in piloting the service. The real goal, though, goes back to the ed tech holy grail of "an IEP for everyone" (my words - inBloom calls it "[integration of] student data and learning applications to support sustainable, cost-effective personalized learning"). If teachers can't easily access data generated by learning applications and stored in SIS/LMS platforms and then quickly find and provide appropriate resources for students based on these data, then we aren't leveraging the tools in which we're investing. Kids are just taking tests on the web and playing computer games at that point and, with 30+ kids in a class, there's no real hope of differentiated instruction.

Although the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation have funded a wide range of educational initiatives, this one (which received initial philanthropic funding from the two organizations) strikes me as one of the most potentially transformative. Nobody benefits if the current unprecedented levels of investor interest in ed tech becomes a bubble that funded lots of applications from which teachers and students derive limited benefit. But if inBloom can harness these applications to develop a meaningful, well-rounded ecosystem, then the potential for ed tech to achieve much of what it has promised in the last 20 years (with only moderate success) increases significantly. It doesn't hurt that companies with great ideas and great products will be able to tap into a ready market, either, eager to adopt strong applications from a unified ecosystem.

There will be more announcements and demonstrations from inBloom at SxSWEdu at the beginning of March where we'll be able to see the system in action.

My first impression of the Latitude 10 was that, while it wasn't cheap, its form factor, features, flexibility, and, most importantly, use of full x86-based Windows 8 Pro (unlike the Surface which used the fairly hobbled Windows RT), would make the tablet an ideal fit for schools where it could easily be dropped into the ubiquitous Windows infrastructure. Robust, well-understood management tools, whether leveraging Windows Server tools for group policy and directory services or third party tools for imaging and deployment, could finally make tablets an easy fit for stretched IT departments, many of which haven't the time, budget, or wherewithal to introduce new mobile device management.

Price, however, was a real sticking point. It isn't hard to configure a Latitude 10 for close to $700 with Wacom Active Stylus support. A few other cool options can shove the price further north and out of reach of schools that start eying up $399 second-generation iPads. Those iPads have, for better or worse, become the de facto tablets of choice for most schools looking at either 1:1 tablet deployments or mobile tablet labs. While they aren't difficult to manage, especially if you have OS X Server running in a building, there currently isn't anything that can match the ease with which Windows devices can be deployed, integrated, and managed by most schools.

Sure, there are schools with Mac and Linux back ends, but Windows Server has a huge install base in this market. No matter how you feel about Windows and Microsoft, Active Directory and the countless Windows-based third-party management and imaging tools just make managing a network and a lot of users very easy. Ease of use and speed are the two most important factors for school IT staff who rarely have enough time to maintain hundreds of devices, deal with print and file services, manage users and privileges, and provide training and support to end users.

Which means that if the price premium between an iPad and a Windows tablet can be shaved to $150 instead of $300-$400, those Windows tablets start looking awfully attractive for Windows shops. The Essentials configuration for the Latitude 10 does just that. The newly available 64GB model starts at $579 and Dell expects to be releasing a $499 32GB model in the next few months. The Dell representatives I interviewed noted that these prices don't include Windows 8 Pro; they are running standard Windows 8, but most schools have campus licensing agreements with Microsoft that would make upgrades to Win 8 Pro very inexpensive.

The Essentials configurations are also lacking a few features of their more expensive brethren, but for most student users, these are non-issues. The replaceable battery goes away, as does a screen that supports the Wacom Active Stylus. Processors, memory, and other performance-related parts, though, are all the same. The Essentials versions are also compatible with the very cool dock made for the Latitude 10; the folks at Dell noted that many schools have expressed interest in outfitting computer labs with the docks, keyboards, and mice instead of full-blown desktop PCs and monitors so that students in 1:1 settings with the Latitudes can just walk into a lab, drop their tablets in the docks, and begin typing.

Project Ophelia, on the other hand, could really redefine what we mean by 1:1 and take the idea of thin, flexible labs to a new level. The thumb drive-sized devices plug into virtually any screen and immediately bring the user into a customized Android environment. For schools that have moved to cloud-based services like Google Apps or have the infrastructure to deliver remote or virtual desktops, this solution becomes downright cheap. Access to a school's instance of Google Apps, an LMS, and any of several other web-based educational systems could happen on a television, many monitors, or virtually anything with a USB port.

Project Ophelia certainly requires a different mindset than most student computing to date, but any schools looking at thin clients, VDI, or any other solution for maximizing student computing access and minimizing costs owes it to themselves and their students to look at the project.

More importantly, though, the article led the folks at Share With 911 to reach out and tell me about the new service they're rolling out this year. Share With 911 is brilliant, both in its simplicity and its game-changing ability to empower both school staff and emergency personnel to quickly and proactively act and communicate in a variety of emergency situations. In fact, even though it's only the second day of 2013, I'm ready to call Share With 911 the best web application of the year for K12 schools. Here's why:

Share With 911 is designed primarily to allow teachers to use smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, or any web-connected device to provide real-time information on emergency situations to first responders and colleagues. Through a stripped down web interface that works flawlessly regardless of the device through which it's accessed, any member of a school's staff can initiate a lockdown if they see something suspicious or dangerous. As soon as they send out the lockdown message (which can be a simple as hitting a lockdown radio button and clicking submit or which can include a short message describing the situation), every staff member and every law enforcement officer in the community is immediately alerted via a text message and/or email.

The key takeaway from my last article was that seconds count and anything schools can do to buy time in an emergency can be critically important. Share With 911 dispenses with time wasted coordinating with administrators, connecting with 911, working with a dispatcher, and waiting for appropriate personnel to be dispatched. Instead, every first responder, on duty or off, in or near the community simply gets a text message and can head for the school wihout delay.

At the same time, Share With 911 provides a dashboard of updates in real time to approaching law enforcement, again all available through a simple, mobile-friendly HTML interface. Teachers can check in and report whether their classrooms are secure, if any students are unaccounted for, if they have extra students for whom staff may be looking, where they are located, and if they have critical needs (e.g., a hostage situation). The dashboard categorizes these updates from most critical to least critical so that by the time law enforcement arrives on the scene, they already have a decent picture of where to focus their efforts.

Additionally, the system provides floor plans and aerial views of the school, as well as translates room numbers into meaningful nomenclature for first responders. For emergency personnel, the front of the building is universally Sector A. Sectors B-D are always assigned by moving around the building clockwise. So while Room 203 (where Mrs. Jones checked in and reported an active hostage situation) may have no meaning to a SWAT team, "Second floor, Sector C" does, especially when combined with a floor plan.

Share With 911 is rolling out in pilots this spring in 10 school districts in New Jersey. Implementation involves coordination between schools and law enforcement and, in the case of one of the pilot districts, police in five other surrounding towns. As with many small towns, neighboring police forces often respond to emergencies as well and in this case, all officers in all 6 towns will be alerted via SMS if the system is activated.

Share With 911 isn't free, but given that the service is only billed per school staff member and all law enforcement users are free, it's extremely reasonable (the "number of people in your database" on the pricing page refers only to school staff members). Most parents, educators, and first responders will agree that it only needs to save one life to be priceless. Although the service is only entering pilots now, Share With 911 is ready to start bringing more districts on board now. 

This is totally natural and I hope that a reasonable conversation on gun control comes out of it. However, conversations about gun control and related policy matters are rarely reasonable and most likely won't be especially timely. Nor will any legislative action around specific gun control measures be a panacea for school safety. Determined and sophisticated attackers will find means other than an assault rifle with an extended magazine to threaten our children. So let's set gun control aside for a bit.

Instead, let's think about some very reasonable, affordable solutions that don't literally require an act of Congress to move forward. Just as gun control legislation won't be a cure-all, neither will these, but they can definitely be part of an holistic approach to ensuring that schools are the safe havens they are supposed to be for young people. I'd like to thank Tony Roman, CEO of Roman & Associates (a full-service security, investigation, and risk management firm with a worldwide portfolio of clients from banks and insurance companies to art museums and schools), who reached out to me this week for a long and informative discussion about school security.

As Mr. Roman pointed out, the entire tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary unfolded over less than five minutes. By the time police arrived, it was over and the shooter had killed himself after taking 26 lives at the school in addition to his own. Tony explained that schools don't need to jail-like institutions and the extreme solution of armed teachers is both unnecessary and dangerous. Rather, in the security field, he said, "10 minutes is the magic number...what schools need to be able to do is buy time."

Interestingly, when a fire alarm gets pulled in a school, even if it's just by a kid who doesn't want to take a test the next period, the fire department is automatically called and dispatched to the school and fire personnel must clear the building before students are allowed back in. Yet few schools have such a system for automatically contacting police if the school perimeter is breached or if staff hit a "silent alarm". This sort of alarm that doesn't require staff to waste precious moments calling police (if they are even able to do so), explaining the situation, having the call passed through to dispatch, and finally getting officers on the scene.

Banks have had these so-called silent alarms for so long that every movie or television show featuring a bank holdup inevitably makes some mention of whether or not it was activated. But our schools? We just hope that someone who knows what's going on is still capable of making a phone call.

Continuing along the lines of buying time, security experts generally agree that simple door and lock upgrades could make every classroom a "safe room" or "panic room" (yes, the same safe rooms that the wealthy and powerful build in their homes and offices to protect themselves and their families from would-be attackers and kidnappers). Schools have the advantage of generally being built like concrete bunkers to meet specific fire codes and contain costs. Thus, most classrooms have only a single point of entry. Robust locks that can't easily be kicked or shot open will deter and delay all but the most determined of attackers.

Most schools have a lockdown procedure and it's clear that the teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary executed their lockdown with aplomb. However, a lockdown is only as good as its locks. Newer schools will often have intrusion-resistant doors and locks, but the many older schools in the country could benefit more from classroom door upgrades than any computer upgrades I could dream up.

The final facilities upgrades that Tony recommended also largely apply to older schools, but aging schools far outnumber modern facilities in this country. Essentially, the goal is to absolutely and transparently control entrance to and egress from the school. All doors other than the front door, for example, should have panic bars installed for rapid evacuation but be 100% inaccessible from the outside. These doors also all need to be centrally monitored to ensure that they are always closed and locking mechanisms are never bypassed. Finally, while security cameras can be incredibly sophisticated with thermal imaging and automatic license plate screening, they can also support administrators and first respodeers with eyes in every corridor

A typical set of upgrades for a mid-sized school would run between $150,000 and $250,000 with nominal yearly maintenance fees. Yet a look back at Sandy Hook reveals that such a system could have had police on the scene nearly 2 minutes earlier and kept the attacker wandering long enough to possibly have dramatically changed the outcome. Certainly this is worth the cost of a full tech refresh.

As one security expert put it on NPR earlier this week, 

"I'm being inundated with phone calls from schools looking to improve their safety. My question for them is, 'Why weren't you calling me before now?'"

None of this is rocket science. None of this is high-tech wizardry. It's a set of simple, low-tech physical security upgrades that need to be on every school's budget for the coming year. There simply isn't any excuse to accept less.

The winner, Forward Tutoring, will use the $10,000 prize to expand its programs at several universities:

Forward Tutoring is an online platform where students earn credits for volunteering in their communities and redeem those credits for tutoring from other qualified students; tutors in turn can earn scholarships and internships from supporting organizations. 

The cost of tutoring has long been a barrier to the students who need it most. Similarly, building an ethic of service and community in our students has never been an easy task. Forward Tutoring is bringing those two efforts together and creating wins at lots of levels for students, schools, and non-profits, and communities:

Nonprofits post and promote exciting and relevant volunteer opportunities for Forward Tutoring users to get involved in.

Students seek tutoring then volunteer in their communities to obtain the tutoring credits.

Academically talented students provide free, live online tutoring for students who need help. After passing a comprehensive qualification process, tutors not only receive volunteer hours for their tutoring time but also become eligible to receive internships and scholarships from supporting organizations and corporations.

The three other finalist groups also brought some very interesting ideas forward and, although they didn't win the competition, their international scope and ambitious missions were quite compelling. Dell's press release described the other groups and their activities:

Gyan Knowledge Lab, which sets up hands-on learning labs for primary students in India to keep them engaged in their education and prevent drop-outs. Gyan Knowledge Lab took home the second place prize.

e-Education for GAZA, which seeks to overcome geographic barriers to quality education for Gaza’s children with learning difficulties through video curriculum, where Gaza’s teachers can connect with education experts in their subject matters.

Next Step Leaders, which provides leadership development training for highly effective teachers in roles such as department chairs or grade-level leaders. Teachers receive 360 degree feedback, personalized assessments, whole group leadership training and individualized one-on-one coaching.

It's always good to see a company literally put its money where its mouth is, especially as Dell continues to advance the conversation around education and the smart use of technology for learning.

I could spin this post to be about technology. After all, we could lock down every school with key card access, video surveillance, RFIDs, and any number of other bits of technology to keep our kids safe, but this is hardly an environment conducive to learning and simply being a child.

I could talk about violent video games and media glorification of violence but I think most of know this has nothing to do with any of that.

I could make this a rant about gun control but now isn't the time and this certainly isn't the place.

I could make this about education and the fact that if kids don't feel safe, they can't learn. But Newtown, CT, is an affluent community with virtually no poverty or violence and no reason for students to feel unsafe, whether they are in their schools or traveling between home and school.

I could write about how school violence is a sign of our increasingly isolated and social media-driven society, where a lack of personal connections means that people who need help aren't being identified before they do something like this, but it's not as if the entire country is going to abandon social media and start having lovefests over big community dinners.

Unfortunately, all of that is empty crap when so many kids have just died. So all I'll do is add my worthless condolences and sit at my computer thanking whatever higher power might be out there that it wasn't my kids. Because it could have been Anytown, USA, and it could have been #AnySchoolElementary that's trending on Twitter right now instead of Newtown, CT, and Sandy Hook Elementary. Whatever comes of this, something has to change. Whether it's our laws, our mental health safety nets, the environment in which we educate our kids, or something else entirely, this can't happen again.

To the parents, families, friends, and loved ones whose lives have been senselessly shattered today, I can't express my own sorrow and I can't even imagine yours.

And to those who lost their lives today, rest in peace.

The day before, though, was tougher. I spent a couple of hours helping one of my kids (currently a freshman in college) with his algebra homework. I'd love to say that we were working through advanced linear algebra concepts or some challenging combinatorics. Instead, though, this was homework for his remedial algebra class, designed to help students make up the difference between what they learned in high school and what they need for college. His school offers several sections of this course and they are always full.

A bit of conversation with his older brother (now a junior at another college) revealed that the same situation existed at his school.

Kid #3 (17 and a senior at our local, highly-ranked tech school) was struggling with work for an internship. The work should have been child's play for someone in their fourth year of an information technology program at a modern technical high school.

What was wrong with this picture? All three of them had passed their state standardized tests with at least reasonable marks and kid #3's technical assessments were solid. Most of my college kids' peers had passed the same tests. Massachusetts has some of the most rigorous standardized tests in the nation; they are required for graduation and, in theory, are designed to demonstrate competence in state standards, which, in turn, are alligned with college readiness. Passing the tests should mean that there simply isn't a need for remedial mathematics education when they hit college.

Maybe they won't be ready for college-level calculus or even a statistics and probability course, but they shouldn't need to work on finding the roots of quadratic equations or be introduced to rational expressions. If they haven't mastered these concepts in high school, they shouldn't pass the state exams and appropriate safety nets should be in place to make sure that remediation happens long before they hit post-secondary education. This isn't rocket science. It's sound education to which administrators, politicians, and school boards pay lip service every day.

If everything is working as it should, state colleges and universities should be able to eliminate these remedial courses. If they exist, they certainly shouldn't be filled up with students who have already met state competency requirements in high school. And yet, not just in Massachusetts, but across the country, college students enroll in remedial math and language classes every semester of every year.

Which means that the system has failed. This isn't even saying anything about students who drop out or don't go on to post-secondary education. I'm only talking about the students who have "made it"...the kids who didn't just graduate from high school but actually went to college.

Please don't think this diminishes the work of the many great teachers and high-performing schools out there that have made hard choices, drastic changes, bucked the system, and are doing wonderful work. For these islands of outstanding work, I'm absolutely thankful. What I'm not thankful for is utter lack of preparedness, both for the "real world" and for college-level coursework that far too many of our students display. There is no better evidence for this critical problem than the presence of several sections of remedial math and English that can be found in course catalogs from colleges and universities around the country.

In large part, this is just a blog about education. We're just around the corner from 2013 and it pains me how little progress we've made towards really improving educational and vocational outcomes for students. In part though, this is yet another place where ed tech can make a real difference without imposing any hardship on overextended teachers and schools.

• Adaptive learning technology is mature and ready for prime time. Whether in a lab or through 1:1 programs, software already exists (and good frameworks exist for extending the technology across the curriculum) that provides real-time data to teachers, helps reinforce scaffolding for students, and manages remediation on the fly.
• Our ability to analyze, understand, and act on data is growing at an extraordinary pace. There is no reason for us not to build meaningful, deep educational profiles on our students and use these to design "IEPs for everyone" in a largely automated fashion.
• Digital portfolios and outcomes-based education must replace standardized tests which are obviously failing to pick out students who are not prepared for college and career. Adobe Acrobat, PathBrite, and many other tools allow for students and teachers to easily assemble and reflect upon a variety of work and, again, form a much better picture of a student's performance than yearly, high-stakes, summative assessments.
• If I hear about one more kid who "just couldn't find any information about [fill in topic here] on the Internet", I'm going to blow a gasket. Our students should be experts on information retrieval, evaluation, analysis, and synthesis. There is no reason why students should ever answer "I don't know" to a question and they need to be given opportunities to develop and hone these skills across curricula for their entire educational careers.

All of this requires system change on a massive scale, though. The technology is ready...Are your schools? Because we don't really have time to wait.

Tablets, in fact, are changing the ways in which we both consume and create content and the sophistication of apps for education is increasing at a blistering pace. So why would I possibly want a smartpen that writes on dead trees? No matter how smart the pen, that seems pretty old school, right? Not quite.

There are some pretty great handwriting and notetaking apps available on both iOS and Android. Penultimate is my favorite, by far, and, along with ArtRage (both of which are iOS-only), gets more use than any other app or feature on my iPad. Because Penultimate is now owned by Evernote, everything I write or draw automatically appears in my Evernote account. And Evernote, as it is for many people, is utterly indispensible for me.

So where does the smartpen come in? Even with a tool like Doceri's GoodPoint stylus (a truly awesome stylus that has both erase and write heads), writing on a tablet remains suboptimal. The slight lag between stroke and appearance on the screen is distracting and no matter how brilliant the display, the limitations of capacitive touch screens are such that you simply can't achieve the precision or detail of a pen and paper. The closest I've seen to a realistic writing experience on a tablet came on the Windows 8-based Dell Latitude 10, thanks to the built-in Wacom digitizer.

Livescribe's new Sky WiFi pen marries pen and paper precision with a few key digital features that make a whole lot of sense in an educational setting:

• Like the smartpens from Livescribe before it, it digitizes all notes taken on proprietary Livescribe paper tablets
• It simultaneously records sounds as you are taking notes, letting teachers create screencasts with audio simply by writing or drawing, letting students record lectures and discussions while they take notes, and even letting students explain their work verbally as they complete homework.
• The last feature is pretty slick, but it becomes awesome when you realize that tapping anywhere within the notes plays the audio that was recorded while they were being taken. Thus, a student could tap a graph he copied in class and hear what the instructor was explaining about the graph while he was copying it.
• None of these features are new; what is new is that all of these notes, recordings and all, are automatically synced to an Evernote notebook. The syncing is in near real time and synced notes retain all of the functionality of the paper versions. As the WiFi smartpen's name would suggest, this is all done over a wireless connection.

The Sky smartpen has been thoroughly reviewed and positively received around the general tech blogosphere. What interests me, though, are the educational possibilities this syncing opens up.

1. Schools that can't afford 1:1 could, for a fraction of the cost, supply students with (or have them purchase) Sky smartpens and then rely on Evernote for content sharing, collaboration, studying notes, etc. (Evernote notebooks can be shared). Students can access their Evernote accounts on any web browser, any smartphone, or any tablet. While this approach doesn't give anywhere/anytime access to apps and the Internet, it very cost-effectively enables digital notes and content distribution. It also makes BYOD more effective, since the platform is device-agnostic.
2. Schools with 1:1 programs (or some sort of BYOD program) suddenly have a much more effective and natural means of promoting notetaking, getting notes into the 1:1 devices, and enabling even the most technophobic teachers to create and share digital content with students and peers.
3. All of those teachers who still use the whiteboard or overhead projectors? Their writing-intensive approaches translate very well to writing on Livescribe paper but can be enhanced with audio automatically for students whose learning styles don't sync well with writing-heavy note delivery (interestingly, most teachers are reading/writing-oriented while only around 10% of students learn best with this approach).

Livescribe has done a really nice job of making paper work quite well in a tablet world (and in broad cross-sections of the world where tablets simply aren't affordable). Within a couple of years, tablets will most likely have reached a level of ubiquity and touch screens will have matured such that the dual media (pen/paper and computing device) approach might not make as much sense. At that point, I won't be surprised at all if Livescribe begins making styli that bring their audio recording and screencasting technologies directly to tablets. For now, though, the Sky smartpen provides the best features of paper with an Evernote-driven twist that is very hard to ignore. It's just too slick and effective on too many levels for schools not to have it on their short lists of great technology, whether or not they have successfully rolled out 1:1.

Udacity, a key Coursera competitor, announced a $15 million round of financing last week, bring their total for the past 12 months to $21 million and change in venture capital. 2U (formerly 2Tor) raised $26 million. CodeAcademy? $10 million. To be clear, 2U is a platform on which universities can offer online degrees and isn't focused on MOOCs, specifically, but you get the idea. There's big money being invested here, even if the returns aren't 100% clear.

Most of these companies share similar missions of bring high-quality education to the masses, whether or not they can afford degrees from Stanford, MIT, or any of the other institutions with which they partner. Some are designed as for-profit enterprises; others are mission-driven non-profits. Some grant degrees while others just provide learning opportunities to hundreds of thousands of students worldwide.

Time recently featured a story called "College is Dead, Long Live College," about the MOOC movement and what appears to be the powerful leveling effect these courses can have worldwide. It offered a moving portrait of diverse students from around the world coming together to find ways to ensure that an 11-year old girl in Pakistan could complete a college-level physics course on Udacity after the Pakistani government blocked access to YouTube. The girl ended up acing the course thanks to fellow students she'd never met finding workarounds to her government's censorship (talk about empowering women with education!).

Clearly, these sorts of courses and the companies that are making them possible represent at least one aspect of the future of education and are poster children for the democritization of education. Enter Instructure, the LMS vendor co-founded by ex-Mozy CEO Josh Coates with the intention of disrupting the LMS market dominated by Blackboard. So far, Instructure has found rapid success in that aspect of the education market. In just two years, they have brought over 4 million students onto their Canvas LMS and are signing on new institutions at a lightning pace.

Today, Instructure announced its own courses platform called the Canvas Network. Although the Canvas Network (which runs on the Canvas LMS) can support full-blown MOOCs, the company brings a different philosophy to the table. In a press release, the company explained,

Canvas Network allows institutions to define the structure of their courses and the approach to teaching that makes the most sense to them. Some institutions have chosen to pursue a massive open online course format (MOOC), and some have chosen to pursue a smaller online course format with more interaction. Often the courses are taught on the same platform the institution uses to teach tuition-based courses, which means students have a seamless experience as they progress through their academic journey.

I talked with Brian Whitmer, Instructure's co-founder and Chief Product Officer, on Wednesday about the Network. His message was somewhat refreshing when the ed tech community has been so focused on MOOCs. Not all classes lend themselves to a massive online format. The Canvas Network is about open online courses. The massive part is at the discretion of the institution offering the course.

That said, when courses begin in January, I expect that more than a few of them will fill to capacity (whatever capacity the institution decides) very quickly. Where else could you hear Stan Lee (yes, the Stan Lee) among others talk about gender studies in the context of comic books?

Interestingly, it isn't just colleges using the platform. Lumen Learning is using the Canvas Network to make an English Composition curriculum available for free, primarily targeting students at risk. As they note on their Network course page, 

Lumen supports institutions to use open education models to improve student success.

• Eliminates textbook costs as a barrier
• Ensures quality instructional design
• Supports faculty success and development
• Analyzes and improves learning results

The whole course, taken asynchronously and on-demand, is Creative Commons 3.0 licensed. Canvas is just the platform in this case on which written and video materials are hosted.

The takeaway here is that one size doesn't fit all in terms of open online education. And I'm not just talking about MOOC vs. "not MOOC." I'm talking about using available platforms to deliver many types of educational content in many ways, whether replacing books and supplementing work by K12 instructors or introducing game design to countless aspiring geeks. Instructure has demonstrated with the success of Canvas as an LMS that they have the platform. It will be interesting to see how they continue to leverage the technology to improve the delivery of online education.

From a business perspective, it will also be interesting to see what these courses do in terms of building out an already robust sales pipeline for the Canvas LMS as thousands of new students and institutions are exposed to the platform. This isn't meant to be cynical. This is actually social entrepreneurship at its best. I've already signed up for the Applied Business Communication course from Flatworld Knowledge. Maybe I'll see you there.

Anthony and I particularly talked about the use of technology as a catalyst for real educational change, risk-taking, and scaling innovative approaches. We also talked, among other things, about the relatively new business of "edupreneurship":

According to Dawson, the businesses that are actually successful in the world of edu-preneurship usually involve a teacher. “For many, many years, there has been this imposition of technology on teachers because a company thinks they know how to shoehorn a piece of technology into the classroom,” says Dawson. “Teachers absolutely must be a pivotal part of this. Edu-preneurship is really about being an entrepreneur, doing it within the educational space, and drawing teachers into it.”

You can watch our whole talk in the video below or read the whole post on Daily Edventures.

Chasen said the decision to depart was reached amicably and that he was ready to pursue new opportunities after 15 years in a high-demand job. Will that next step be part of another start-up or another large firm? Either is an option, he said.

Chasen is only a couple years older than I am and has three kids. It's not unreasonable that he might want to slow things down a bit, particularly after a tumultuous year of acquisitions and increasing competition in the enterprise LMS market. After the company's purchase by Providence Equity Partners for a cool $1.6 billion and change last October, Chasen agreed to stay on as CEO for at least a year. It's been a year and now the CEO of a mutlibillion dollar technology company (Jay Bhatt, CEO of Progress Software and formerly of Autodesk) has been tapped to fill his shoes.

In fact, it's not so much Chasen's departure that sends up a couple of red flags (or, at least, yellow flags). Rather, it's the choice of Bhatt as the next CEO that signals a rapidly shifting market and which should put other ed tech companies on alert. Like Lou Gerstner coming to IBM from RJR Nabisco or Alan Mulally coming to Ford from Boeing, Bhatt, with no formal experience in education but lots of experience in M&A and business strategy, is a change agent. Blackboard, after years of losing market share to a variety of upstarts, is going to grow and diversify in a big way.

The strategy began with the surprise acquisition of Moodlerooms and Netspot. According to Ray Henderson, President of Blackboard Learn and, interestingly, former head of product strategy for one of Blackboard's acquisitions, Angel Learning, 

The road ahead for Blackboard presents a very different set of challenges than those Michael faced in our early days. Michael’s awareness of this was one of the drivers behind his pursuit of our current structure as a private company with the backing of Providence Equity Partners. Michael and our Board also recognized that Blackboard’s next phase would require a leader with experience, insight and passion to tackle these challenges, and that search has identified a uniquely qualified individual in Jay Bhatt...

It's no secret that the LMS market is shifting quickly with new entrants popping up overnight to cash in on the ed tech boom. Last week, I began a project with a colleague to put together a Moodle site for her online teaching efforts; it took about an hour for us to realize that Google Apps was actually better suited to her needs than Moodle or any other formal LMS. And, as the Gilfus Education Group noted, companies like Adrenna are adapting open source content management systems (in their case, Drupal) to meet the needs of educational institutions.

So what's next for Blackboard? That's hard to say. But I think it's safe to say that the right acquisitions, leadership, and private equity capital have the potential to bring Blackboard back to a position of dominance in ed tech, this time with a suite of services and products instead of merely Blackboard Learn. Despite its continued majority share of the market, Learn is getting a bit long in the tooth and is feeling competitive pressure more than ever. That pressure will do nothing but increase in the months and years to come. I wouldn't be surprised to see Blackboard looking a lot more like Pearson two years from now than just another LMS vendor (albeit a big and succussful one). I'm sure Mr. Henderson will be pulling a few pages from the Pearson playbook, given his years there before he joined Angel and I don't see Mr. Bhatt taking too long to jump into the fray feet first.

Not surprisingly, we had another great talk, but over and over it came up that our current system of high-stakes assessments is broken at best. They do little but penalize students, schools, and teachers and interfere with actual learning in extraordinary ways.

What bothers me most about this, though, is that the technology already exists to assess students' progress on an ongoing basis in a variety of ways, aggregate the data, and drive education in truly personalized and amazing ways. Look at the business intelligence and analytics that businesses apply every day to make decisions and course corrections: 

• Walmart knows the items a store needs before its employees do and ships stock automatically
• Credit card companies examine credit histories and card usage patterns to identify high-risk customers or those for whom risk is increasing
• Data from online advertising (click-throughs, conversions, repeated visits, etc.) drive changes to marketing campaigns
• Retailers target consumers with advertisements for products they are likely to buy based on past purchases
• Manufacturers analyze supply chain and production data to improve processes and increase efficiencies
• Insurance companies set rates based on shifting risk profiles built from a variety of data sources

This list could go on for pages. Mid-sized and large companies analyze gigabytes (and even terabytes) of data every week, making both automatic adjustments and providing information to leaders and stakeholders that enables informed strategic planning. Even small businesses regularly use analytic tools to adjust inventory, modify websites, target advertising dollars, and plan for new products.

We're beginning to see the emergence of BI in education - Three years ago, I wrote about an IBM system being used in Mobile, Alabamma, to identify, among other things, students at risk of dropout based on everything from grades to markers of socioeconomic status. But this hasn't managed to scale across states and districts. Too many schools remain focused on high-stakes tests as their sole means of evaluating student achievement. The introduction of student growth models (essentially comparing students to themselves, looking at how they, and the cohorts of which they are members, improve over time) has been an improvement over earlier cross-sectional analyses of NCLB testing data, but in most cases, it still hinges on those same summative assessments that students take every year.

In the same way, adaptive learning software and "Response to Intervention" approaches like those used by Lexia Learning's literacy products represent major steps forward in this area, giving teachers data in real time about individual students and providing scaffolding automatically based on student capabilities. Unfortunately, really useful data like those collected by Lexia, ST Math, and other similar platforms are rarely combined with other sources of student data in ways that would allow us to actually leverage all of the sophisticated BI technology we have at our disposal.

With robust student information systems, learning management systems, instructional software, and powerful data mining tools at our fingertips, "item analysis days" need to become a thing of the past. For those of you unfamiliar with item analysis days (or whatever term your schools or districts use to describe them), teachers in many schools wipe out entire days of professional development examining where last years' students performed poorly on state exams. Then they can shift their curricula to teach to the test better next year...I mean, errr, remap their curricula to better match state standards.

Click here to find out what our information systems should (and could) really be doing for us.

Here's what should really be happening with our vast information systems that we keep building to manage student data:

• Analyze student performance in specific software applications, in written work, and on a variety of assessments to accurately assess student learning styles. This information, along with identified strengths and weaknesses and relevant supporting materials should be provided early and often to teachers so they can stand a chance of meaningfully differentiating instruction.
• Use adaptive learning systems for practice, homework, and ongoing assessment. These systems help students continue to build skills with which they struggle, advance quickly where they excel, and provide useful data to teachers who can again better differentiate instruction among students (no small task with 30 kids in a class, a third of whom may also have special needs).
• Continuously analyze incoming data from these tools and traditional assessments aligned with thoughtful standards to identify deficiencies or potential disabilities as early as possible (and then assess the success of whatever interventions a school puts into place).
• Aggregate the data above with demographic and socioeconomic data to identify students at risk or those who are not growing as expected; subtle shifts in academic progress can be easily detected with the right algorithms, but as class sizes increase, it's quite difficult for teachers to observe and act upon these changes, many of which can be signs of larger issues in a student's life.
• Provide big-picture data to schools and teachers, e.g., subsets of students who are failing to meet particular standards. This sort of information is vital to strategic planning, but, to date, has too often been based on limited snapshots of data (like yearly state exams) and has been used to punish teachers and districts instead of engineer strategic shifts in curriculum and instruction.
• Once all of these elements are in place, BI and analytics tools will be able to meaningfully and objectively identify the professional development needs of specific teachers. If kinesthetic learners in Mrs. Smith's class repeatedly achieve at lower levels than students in her class or other kinesthetic learners in the same grade, then it won't be hard to outline opportunities for her own professional growth and continuing education. Want to implement merit pay without a mutiny? Then let a broad, transparent, robust data set objectively identify the teachers who so clearly stand out from the pack that it brooks no argument.

There are obviously major obstacles in terms of equity, access to resources, and the breadth and depth of available software to make this happen. But until we can take an holistic approach to analyzing and acting on a large body of student data, we'll be spinning our wheels with high-stakes tests that do far more harm than good.

Teachers need to be able to focus on aspects of learning that a computer can't quantify or analyze. How well do students collaborate? How effectively do they communicate? Where are specific learning disabilties or areas of academic and social challenge interfere with their learning? And how can they adjust instruction to best address those challenges? How can gifted students remain motivated and challenged? How can average students find niches in which they shine? And how can struggling learners overcome countless obstacles? Computers will never replace great teachers, but they should free teachers to do their jobs more effectively and ensure that students are more than just data points.

The Partnership released data at the end of August demonstrating the improvements on the CSTs (the California Standards Test) and associated many of the shifts towards increased proficiency with the use of ST Math and Lexia Learning's adaptive instructional software. Although I'm not a big fan of high-stakes standardized tests, they are useful for demonstrating the results of particular interventions. According to a Partnership press release,

“These CST scores represent the best year yet for the Partnership for LA Schools,” said Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. “We saw improvements in all core subjects, and substantial gains at most of the schools...

Mayor Villaraigosa launched the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools in 2007 to focus reform and resources on a set of historically low performing schools and to help drive change in LAUSD. It is one of the largest public school turnaround efforts in the nation, serving more than 16,000 low-income students in 22 schools located in high-need urban  neighborhoods across East L.A., Watts, and South LA. 

Check out the interview below. 

By the time we were done talking, he had titled the article "The State of the iPad in Education: a Giant Mess". Not a terribly flattering description, to be sure, but unfortunately fairly accurate. This isn't to say that there aren't educators and students doing awesome things with iPads. However, as long as we keep talking about textbooks (Audrey Watters is right - they're an anachronism of the first degree and Apple is first in line perpetuating this) and not talking about DRM, as long as we keep looking at tablets as glorified e-readers with mediocre apps focused on content consumption, then iPads (or any other tablet) won't be leading the charge in an education revolution.

When John and I discussed BYOD and iPad adoption, we discussed hidden costs that remain barriers to entry as well:

That $399 cost doesn't even begin to address the less obvious costs of appropriate content and device management systems, school bandwidth, teacher training/professional development, and network infrastructure required to fully leverage the hardware.

What we need are simple tools for curating and disseminating both original content and a wide variety of open and licensed content. We need teachers with the subject matter expertise to both create original materials that meet their students' needs and the resources to assemble outside materials and get them to their students. And in situations where textbooks still make sense, we need to intelligently license highly interactive materials with customizable and individualized supporting materials for students with widely varying abilities and learning styles.

Speaking of which, the real power of tablets will come when applications actively collect data on student progress and conceptual mastery, analyze strengths and weaknesses on the fly, assess learning styles as students work, and present content automatically that matches these data. It isn't going to come when Pearson digitizes all of its textbooks.

Many of the pieces are already in place. MentorMob, for example, has created a platform where it is remarkably easy to pull together disparate pieces of content in a very touch-friendly browser experience. Dell's next-generation education platform is getting at the individualized, data-driven education approach, but is still maturing. Apple has great tools for easily capturing and distributing podcasts. Google has wonderful collaborative tools in Google Apps, along with integrated device management. The list goes on.

But none of these have come together yet to make tablets in education really meaningful at scale. To be honest, I've seen more innovative use of tablets among home schoolers than I have in many schools where there are large-scale deployments.

I'll leave this with a final quote from my interview with John Martellaro:

...the relatively independent nature of study and research at the post-secondary level means that tablet devices are great tools for on-the-fly study and research. In K-12, though, our educational system is built (unfortunately) around standardized tests and proscribed curricula from publishers, states, and local decision-makers. If these curricula aren't available electronically or don't fit with student-centered computing models, then schools often can't justify the expense of tablets.

Finally, tablets remain devices largely focused on content consumption. K-12 schools are under pressure to have students create more content and participate more actively in education. There are outstanding tools for content creation on both iOS and Android, but many teachers are still struggling to incorporate digital art or mindmaps, for example, into classroom outcomes. While students intuitively use on-screen keyboards and a variety of apps to express themselves, this is uncharted territory for many teachers, again creating barriers to adoption.

Special thanks to John for taking the time to listen to me on my soapbox! You can follow him on Twitter.