Are your school administrators all geeked up about rolling out a 1:1 initiative in your school in a hurry? As an information professional, it may prove helpful for you to be familiar with what works and when to take pause…..
Joyce Valenza was the keynote speaker at the October 5th Saturday morning portion of the MEMO Conference. Within her presentation, she alluded to the problems encountered in Los Angeles’ failed iPad roll-out. A murmur of an undefined sort rippled through the room, which made me wonder if I was the only person who had not read or heard about this news item. Armed with my trusty iPad, I immediately Googled it, and sure enough, the news had only hit the social media circuit on October 2nd, which made me feel slightly better, as I had joined the MEMO Conference on October 3rd.
According to Mind/Shift, “There’s an incredible litany of problems here that reads like a primer on what NOT to do with a major deployment of technology in a school district, “ and I couldn’t agree more. Although the story is about the nation’s second largest public school district, the lessons apply well in most settings.
Read from an insider’s viewpoint what went wrong with a $1 billion plan to give one iPad to every single student ($500 million for devices, plus an additional $500 million for internet infrastructure upgrades, raised through construction bonds). Some of the comments to this blog post are as valuable as the story itself, which is so often the case! Feel free to exercise your right to comment here too….
experience all around! The “open mic” approach was really quite fun, quick, and refreshing. Attendees that wanted to share a resource with the virtual audience had been asked in advance to create a slide and embed it in the larger slideshow so that they’d have a “spot” in the line-up of presenters. As the night progressed, one-by-one each slide appeared on the screen and the mic was turned over to the presenter.