The comments below were given by Dartanyan to the Trustee/School Head Conference sponsored by the California Association of Independent Schools. Held February 5-6, 2000 at San Francisco's Argent Hotel, the conference brought together several hundred of California's most successful Independent School trustees and Heads in wide-ranging discussions of the many issues of vital importance to this robust sector of the the state's education market.

Dartanyan Brown of The Branson School and Dana Kerby, Head of St. Marks School in Marin County, co-hosted a session entitled

"We really explored the roles of the trustee, the head, and the technology director to understand the interwoven responsibilties and dependencies implicit in the relationship.We covered many of the traditional issues while branching out to look at the future and how to prepare for it," said Dartanyan in an interview after the presentation.

My Co-presenter Damon Kerby,left, St. Marks Head of School and Lynn Wendell, President of the Board of Trustees at SF University High School, an introducer at the CAIS Trustee School Head Conference.

The following ideas and points of discussion are what came to mind when I was asked to speak about the future of instructional technology. It has been more than 14 years since I first started using technology to augment my role as an educator and artist. I must admit that in 1984, I foresaw a world where email, downloadable data files and the ability to find obscure documents with ease would become possible. I have been blessed with a Jazz musician’s heart, a computer geek’s love of gadgets and an educator’s sensibilities. The combination has been helpful in giving me insights into what technology actually has to offer and more importantly, how to effectively communicate these facts to the administrators, faculty and staff I have had the pleasure of serving over the last seven years here in northern California. What follows is a compilation of points we might cover in our time together today….

Simultaneous time: Using the tools of tomorrow to tell the stories of yesteryear

• The basics of Math, Science, English, Languages and History are not going to change. What will change is the way you use technology to underscore the points your teachers make in front of the class in person.

Since most of us here today are the leaders of private schools with a decidedly college preparatory focus, I will bring up a couple of points here:

How you allocate dollars for hardware, software and ultimately staffing will depend on the kind of technology focus you wish to cultivate.

• Are you preparing students for jobs in the outside world?

1. New Tech type high schools bring a decidedly business focus

• Are you attempting to prepare young programmers

1. Math program has to be involved
2. Foundational exercises
3. Security/integrity issues

• Enriched curriculum with deeply integrated tools basically digitizing as many of the traditional, time-honored project formats.

1. Enable students to be conversant with all forms of media
2. Interface the old (and respected) work ethic with modern tools and media delivery systems. (see the project on screen instead of mom bringing an 8-foot tissue paper sculpture.

The Internet will become too polluted to use

• How to provide a high quality educational environment is the challenge on the horizon. Basically what I see is an Internet II-type initiative for secondary schools which will establish partnerships with major institutions to provide access to a dot.com-free online learning environment.

• How to leave room for research and discovery while not making our students vulnerable to the culture of retail creeping into our networks.

•Teachers will finally use technology effectively. Curiously, it will happen at the same time they are treated with the same awe and respect as the computers we expect them to use.

• The same old story is getting old (and dangerous) that too many schools expect their teachers to spend their own time and money on materials and training. The school is all to happy to take the credit for new skills learned but too often, they offer inadequate reimbursement. With no reimbursement for individual staff development efforts, a moral problem sets in which has now reached serious proportions. The school systems that win are the ones who invest in the time and equipment to keep their teachers ahead of the curve.

• More effective staff training strategies

1. Match skill building more effectively to individual needs. By giving teachers access to technology tools and then observing how they use them, you can learn a great deal about how they will attempt to use it in the classroom.
2. Accommodate a wider array of technology/curriculum methodologies. If one teacher uses his/her computer as an overhead projector only that’s fine, but you’d better be able to support the dreamer who wants to study environmental similarities in Moscow, Idaho or Moscow, Russia via realtime web interaction with students in those locations.

The crowd for the Technology: Where Do We Go From Here Conference was enthusiastic and inquisitive

Reverence for Intellectual Property

• The creeping retail-ization of the Internet is posing two fundamental problems as we deal with young minds.

1. The outside world is encroaching on our time by stealing valuable attention time with marketing schemes disguised as sex tests, death tests, Love tests and similar offering designed to attract young teens. These online attractions compel teens to give out personal information about themselves and pull them into a culture of materialism at a time when they should be focused on learning.
2. I am seriously concerned about cheapening the work of thousands of musicians, visual artists and wordsmiths whose work is copied without permission by millions of people who routinely pirate music and other intellectual property. Our young people are being desensitized to the fact that the music and art we enjoy were produced over many years by artists who in many cases were never fairly compensated for work they contributed to our society. The ease with which music and many forms of visual art can be reproduced digitally presents an ethical question which falls directly on our shoulders as educators in the 9-12 arena.

    

   Solution: I watched while my own children were barraged with anti-smoking and anti-alcohol message throughout the 90’s in their elementary and middle schools. By the time they were in high school, they were firmly in the non-smoking, non-drinking category. The same thing is now necessary in middle and certainly in high school. Just because we as educators can hide behind our fair use status, doesn’t mean we can shrink from the society-wide problem which starts with that first double-dub tape recorder we buy to make copies for our friends.

Extra comments not included in the presentation.

For those of you who were at the conference it is my sincere wish to stay in touch. If you wish to keep in touch please use my email address which is dartanyan@dartanyan.com or simply click here.

An educational Technologist should be someone who knows something about programming and is not scared of or over awed by programmers or their marketing teams. If you have NO CLUE how the little arrow goes across the screen, you have no business buying or managing technology because you will be too vulnerable to the hyperbole and diversions which the computer industry still subjects us to.

Further notes on point number 3. I have watched while the state of California has systematically devalued its educational system and it’s teachers in capitulation to anti-tax forces beginning with Proposition 13. We now see the results, where we have a prosperous state with public schools some less developed countries wouldn’t claim. I believe that the unwillingness of large segments of our community to support public education is a combination of self-serving materialism and racism or at least provincialism. It is no accident that the three poorest performing schools in San Rafael California are the schools which have the largest percentage of non-english speaking students (most whom haven immigrated into the community in the last 8 years) , poor students and poorly paid teachers in facilities ill-suited to handle either the numbers or the diversity of learning styles exhibited in these highly multicultural school environments.

Using technology tools is not a drudgery task. It is fun, it is challenging, it is going to turn you on, it is going to make you ask questions and it is going to make you not content to sit around doing uninteresting things. If you want teachers to use these tools, you had better celebrate them as the brave new adventurers you are expecting them to be.

Think of what you just thought of when I made that statement.

If you want teachers to use these tools successfully, you are going to have to treat them like the heroes you are expecting them to be. This is a big change for some districts and some schools. You can’t give (or lease) these things to teachers and not expect it to change their lives. Smart people deserve to be treated well and deserve time to play and dream and think about great things.

Give a teacher a computer an internet connection and I’m betting that they’ll make magic happen, but only if they feel free to explore; not hounded to deliver.