What devices are being used at school?

Interesting statistics on the 928 unique devices tracked on our Secondary School wireless network:

Android Phones: 3

Android Tablets: 76

BlackBerry Phones: 40

BlackBerry PlayBooks: 1

iPads: 79

iPhones: 248

Linux PCs: 5

Macs: 171

Windows PCs: 276

Windows Phones: 8

Others: 6

iPhones have eclipsed BlackBerry, the previous phone of choice (BB Messenger being the reason why), and Mac representing a fair proportion of student laptops in use. Android tablets are certainly increasing rapidly although I am surprised at the small number of Android phones tracked.

(Thank you Fernando, our Sysman for the data)

IT resources and bandwidth experiment - is it enough?

Our students are doing a unit involving much internet use (around 80 students in IB Theory of Knowledge course).
How did the IT resources and the school's bandwidth measure up?
Some information - the unit is on a Google Site with links to some video resources (Screencast-o-matic and YouTube), to Google Groups discussion forums and to Google Docs used as a collaborative space. Four classrooms being used, each with its own Fortinet access point, about 20 students per class, with a 600C Fortinet firewall allowing 16Gbps Firewall throughput, up to 3,000,000 concurrent sessions and up to 70,000 new sessions per second. We have a 30 Megabit/second internet connection with 1 to 3 compression which was upgraded to this two years ago - this is a description of it.
So, how did it go?
This is the system resources report on how our Fortigate unit (our firewall) was doing during the heavy load period. Fernando, our Sysman (who provided all this information - thanks!), describes this process as a traffic manager, and you can see it doing really well. Conclusion - enough capacity here.

The following traffic history is from our Fortigate - internally monitoring our bandwidth in a 30 minute interval:

Fernando did a sweep of the classrooms and found some disgruntled students trying to access a Screencast-o-matic video - they had internet bandwidth problems (nb: not wireless access point problems) as well as Java problems (Chrome on Apple, Chromebooks, etc).
However, I noted in following the activity from viewing the collaborative Google Docs that were being produced, that this aspect worked well.
What did it look like from our ISP? Here is the report from the same time:

And here is the problem, our 30 Mbps topping out during this classtime.
So, all the work to upgrade our internal systems has worked, but we need much more bandwidth to cope with our use. Anybody suggest how much?

Panic over - lesson learned from a Google Spreadsheet

Let me set the scene - questionnaire out to all staff on which committees they want to serve on, received on a Google Form, then editing the Google Spreadsheet formed by the answers (including the datestamp information).
It needs a little tidy-up, of course, let's get rid of the datestamp and responder information that was automatically gathered by the form, then share it to all staff....
Spreadsheet disappears and this message appears, for all who access it:

Now, we really needed this information but it was gone!
We had many e-mails back from staff saying that they could not access the spreadsheet, not from home nor from school. Panic!
We contacted Google Enterprise Support the next day and had an instant reply from Eibhin Martin. At least we felt supported.
There were questions to answer and we shared Eibhin into the spreadsheet.
Later, quite by chance, JS found that she had the document open in one of her hundred tabs or so which are habitually open on her computer, and we were able to see a version of the committee lists - phew!
Eibhin got back to us - not a good idea to edit spreadsheets formed from forms - corruption of either or both can be the result.
Lesson learned. We shall make a copy in future before messing with it...

Changes to the CIS Accreditation Indicators

The Council of International Schools (CIS) has recently announced changes to the indicators for two of the accreditation standards in Edition 8.
Sharing here a presentation which I found useful to use to explain what these changes are - feel free to use.
There is such a cross-over between the "Access to Teaching and Learning" and "School Culture and Partnerships for Learning" sections in the new edition that it is difficult to separate them, and I think will create some concept problems in using the new protocols. Let's see.

Communication - telling the story (and listening to the reply)

No organisation can succeed without a clear communications strategy. And ensuring that it is carried out.
This is not just about selling or marketing, it is about telling your story - because if you do not, others will.
Each person's reality is in fact a conglomeration of bits of many stories, often heard and passed into memory without any error checking mechanism. With social media (if not just e-mail), stories can take a life of their own and become the reality for many. The inaccurate and distorted story will then be the reality for your client/parent/community member.
It is necessary to listen too. Not just because you might have to act to ensure the correct version is communicated, but you can also learn and then be able to improve what you do.
This particularly applies to schools, but it also applies to large international organisations too. I am pleased that the International Baccalaureate is improving their communications and congratulate Drew Deutsch, Director for IB Americas, for producing a personal message on Vimeo.This is more like it IBO!
I have been in the audience for many an excellent presentation from IB personnel - but have had to be there in person. Could we hope for other video presentations about the IB programme changes, for example? This is an excellent medium for getting the IB story out to those who implement the programme.
And using blogs, video and social media are great opportunities to listen, too.

IB Teachers have different teaching perspectives profile

I read about the research studies released by the IB in the latest IB News Update for Heads. One of these concerned a study on the IB teacher - The IB teacher professional - identifying, measuring and characterising pedagogical attributes, perspectives and beliefs, based on a research report prepared for the IB by Liz Bergeron and Michael Dean.
The study used various methods and included the Teaching Perspective Inventory (TPI) developed by Pratt, Collins and Selinger (2001).

Personal results:
This is an interesting inventory to take and I have included my result in this blog post. About ten minutes is all that it takes and it is to be found at the Teaching Perspectives Inventory website.

There are five perspectives and these are well described on the website:

• TRANSMISSION:
  Effective teaching requires a substantial commitment to the content or subject matter
• APPRENTICESHIP:
  Effective teaching is a process of socializing students into new behavioral norms and ways of working
• DEVELOPMENTAL:
  Effective teaching must be planned and conducted "from the learner's point of view"
• NURTURING:
  Effective teaching assumes that long-term, hard, persistent effort to achieve comes from the heart, not the head
• SOCIAL REFORM:
  Effective teaching seeks to change society in substantive ways

 and each is divided into Beliefs (what you believe about teaching and learning), Intentions (what you try to accomplish in your teaching, and Actions (what you do when your are teaching).
Using the Dominant and Recessive lines above, you can see I show as dominant in Developmental and Recessive in Transmission. Since I had to think of a particular teaching example whilst doing this inventory, I chose what I currently teach - IB Theory of Knowledge.

Results from the IB Research:
They found that in general, IB teachers are similar; responses are fairly consistent on the TPI, focus groups and open ended survey items, that they carried out.
The average IB teacher and the average TPI database teacher are similar. They have as dominant NURTURING, with backup APPRENTICESHIP and DEVELOPMENTAL.
However, IB teachers value ALL perspectives more and scores are relatively close, whilst in the TPI database only one or two are higher.
Naturally, the study found that IB teachers would describe themselves best by using the IB Learner Profile. SOCIAL REFORM average for IB teachers was higher than 60% of all teachers completing the scale (Pre-kinder to 12th grade sample) - the study wondered if the international dimension could be a factor here.
IB teachers also value using inquiry based instruction and also flexibility in their use of professional judgment, to form their teaching practice.
Could there also be a difference in dominant perspectives in terms of PYP, MYP and Diploma IB teachers?


Pratt, Collins and Selinger (2001) Pratt, D., Collins, J., and Selinger, S.J. 2001. "Development and Use of The Teaching Perspectives Inventory (TPI). Unpublished paper presented at the 2001 AERA annual conference, Seattle, Washington, USA.

IB Communications - finally!

"We heard you" writes Siva Kumari in the first issue of IB News Update, the new quarterly e-publication that focuses on news of special interest to IB Heads of school.
Siva is the Chief Operating Officer, Schools Division, of the International Baccalaureate Office.
There is a suspicion of side-lining of Heads by the IBO - I have to say it is easy to come to this conclusion - so this is a welcome (closed) publication. Thank you!
But we Heads do have opinions and it would be nice to harness social media (a private Google + community?) so as to try these out and to find solutions to our common problems. The IBO should not fear these types of initiatives - we live in times of active and rapid two-way communications and collegiate approaches to solving problems.
It has taken some time for the IBO to get their communications act together and they now have two (generally available) e-publications: IB Global News and IB in Practice (the latter is in its inaugural issue too).
I do wish that the IBO would reconsider their commercial pricing of their new IB Journal of Teaching Practice. This should be the vehicle for reporting research on the all important Approaches to Teaching and Approaches to Learning, and thus be readily to hand for all IB teachers, not just those who fork out the required dollars.

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