Events: The Inside Scoop From SXSWedu 2012

This is a guest post from Kimberly Reeves, longtime reporter on education issues in Texas:

Here are a few lessons I learned learn after attending two major ed tech conferences in Austin in the last month, first the Texas Computer Education Association conference and then last week's SXSWedu:

(1) While many baby boomers might be resistant, ed tech has a broader audience than you think. More than 15,000 teachers and technology specialists attended the weeklong Texas Computer Education Association conference last month. Attendance at every other state conference, and many national conferences, pales by comparison. And, yes, they actually do attend the sessions, rather rabidly.

Click below to read the rest.

(2) Ed tech has finally reached the point where it’s no longer a prop. When I was a fledgling journalism teacher, Pagemaker was still on a single disc. (Remember discs? Me neither.) I sat in a session at TCEA where on-demand games with handheld devices gave teachers real-time feedback on what students did and did not know. Can you imagine the impact that could have on learning? Technology is no longer some outlet for “drill and kill;” it’s actually part of your teaching.

(3) We need to stop thinking about technology in terms of desktops. BYOD is the byword of the ed tech community down in Texas, which is short for “bring your own device.”  Last week, the Eanes ISD school board outside Austin scrapped plans for desktops and smart boards and put all its money on iPads for every child in the district. At a House hearing last month, the Lamar High School principal out of Houston told me he wants to put all textbooks on iPads so that students could carry four years of reference material wherever they went.

(4) There still needs to be a healthy amount of skepticism in the marketplace. I kept hearing at SXSWedu that the presence of behemoths like Pearson and Epsilen in the marketplace has really stifled getting smaller scrappier apps to the classroom, not to mention open source textbooks. Hence, what’s out there in the wild, wild land of ed tech is a whole lot of good ideas but not always great execution.  They had a term for the entrepreneurs who dominated SXSWedu asa way to make a sales pitch: product bombing. And ed tech bloggers, in another session, were critical of education reporters who fawned over every app asthe latest and the greatest. Caveat emptor.

(5) Some are ready to bite the hand that feeds them. SXSWedu was created last year to showcase the Texas Education Agency’s collaborative platform,Project SHARE. This year, the sessions shifted more to product pitches and keynotes from Pearson CEO Marjorie Scardino and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. The hard-core ed tech types in the state, skeptical by nature, were not amused. Duncan’s comments to the group were met with some derision and Occupy Austin picketed Scardino. Already the anti-Pearson opt-out movement is taking hold in Texas.

I always like to leave posts with links so here are some for you.

Duncan strokes techie egos at SXSWedu Texas Observer

Two views, both accurate, of Duncan’s speech at SXSWedu: http://www.techwithintent.com/storify/

The wiki set up by the Opt Out testing movement:

http://optoutofstandardizedtests.wikispaces.com/

And the three best Twitter feeds for Texas ed tech news from the trenches:

@mrhooker

@edtechsandy

@woscholar

 

Comments

[john thompsonj]

Great post. Great links. I loved the Duncan joke, “We have to continue to de-privatize public education.”
Seriously, if we recruited tech saavy young talent, would they stand for the Pearson/Duncan non-stop test prep regime and bubble-in accountability?

[Reality]

The "pickets" from Occupy Austin, though heartfelt, numbered exactly four at Scardino's talk. Hardly "taking hold in Texas" by the evidence at SXSWedu, which had more than 2,000 attendees.

[EdTechSandyK]

Thank you, Kimberly, for highlighting the active edtech community in Texas with this post.

Thank you also for recommending me as someone to follow on Twitter along with Carl & Scott. That's some involved, informed company to be in! In line with that, I'd like to mention that my Twitter handle is @edtechsandyk (the k is left off in the post above).

[Kimmy]

I wouldn't say Occupy Austin represents the anti-testing movement. However, 46 school districts have passed resolutions to revisit standardized testing, and the topic has gotten a lot of buzz.

There is a movement.

[WOScholar]

Great piece, Kimmy. Thanks for the wrap-up. I am hopeful that this is the election that gets teachers fired up enough to vote in large numbers to change the landscape of the Legislature. We have the votes to do it, and with the ridiculous redistricting battle the Lege created this year, it will be easier to oust an incumbent since there will be fewer votes in the primary (due to confusing voting dates of local and state elections)

Moving to a sampling assessment program and away from our "test the crap out of kids" mentality the Lege has created would be a great first step in improving learning and instruction. Having Pearson and Duncan as the keynotes at SXSW was not the best move on someone's part. They both have done enough to make sure we are educating for a 20th Century workforce.

[Michael]

Thank you for the clear expression of where we are in education. There is no way it can be denied that technology is thoroughly integrated into a large percentage of classrooms and that the goal of transparent technology has been achieved by our students at a rate unimagined five years ago. The true "digital divide" in our classrooms remains between students and teachers but that gap is closing at a rate that no administrator can hope to diminish or control. Even as funds get tight, classroom technology is exploding in the form of BYOD. The fight to gain acceptance of and put technology in classrooms was so hard to begin with that sometimes we fail to realize that that battle over and the war is indeed won. What has become a issue for me is being forced to buy and maintain equipment to support Pearson's idea of what should be happening in the classroom. An idea that most unfortunately enjoys the support of the TEA and the current political forces. School personnel have no hope of fixing the tyranny of the top down education that continues to become more oppressive and less financially stable unless they get politically active and VOTE.

@MikeGras

[Carl Hooker]

Thanks for the mention and the great article Kimberly! It was nice chatting and sharing with you at SXSWedu. Just a point of clarification, at Eanes we have a 1:1 iPad program with our Juniors and Seniors at Westlake High School. We haven't decided anything further but have begun discussions with the community, staff, and school board on the possibility of expanding this to all K-12 students in the coming years. As we consider this new technology, we are excited about the possibilities and opportunities these devices could offer our students.

@mrhooker