'Bright Futures' Needs Help

by Cal Bryant - May 16th, 2007 - Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald

[Posting updated with new material on Friday May 18th at 11:00 PM]

While the commissioners continue to seek ways to implement countywide high-speed internet access, the school system is eager to move forward with Bright Futures. At Monday’s joint meeting with the commissioners at the new Bertie Middle School, Interim Superintendent Dr. Michel Priddy said the educational benefits of the program, especially from a standpoint of using web-based technology, was too good to pass up.

'Bright Futures' Needs Help? Yes it does! The help it needs is some sanity in setting intelligent technology goals and strategies for our school system. This is one place where I disagree with Dr. Priddy if he is saying this is our best choice for spending money on computer technology at this point.

Getting our students up to speed with technology is certainly a laudatory goal. However there is little to indicate that the process to do that here in Bertie County is being planned with an eye to useful expenditure of money and getting the basic foundations in place before we do flashy projects that will cost a fortune. It is a well known fact that if you want to spread computer acceptance and culture, you start at the top.

What do I mean by that?

The best known story that communicates this concept is when Jack Welch, former Chairman of General Electric, became a true believer in computers and the powerful tools which they can provide to tie an organization together. This was back in the early 1990s. He ended the process of implementing computers at the bottom of the employment brackets in GE and demanded that all top executives immediately become computer literate first. I repeat, that was done first. All executives had to learn how to use email, word processing and project collaboration tools before they could plan projects for lower levels of managers and employees. Welch demanded executives quit using their secretaries to handle their email, and use it themselves. Welch demanded they learn how to do it personally! He demanded that executives become computer literate themselves so they could spread that expertise downward in a cost effective way. He believed that when they were computer literate they could be more rational in managing the strategy by which their divisions adopted the technology. This top down process was a key component in making GE the most profitable corporation in the world, and the most effective user of technology among all corporations.

Before we try to implement something like "Bright Futures" here in Bertie County, we need computer literacy and USE to be a standard part of our teacher's and administrator's culture. There are a lot fewer teachers than students in our middle school and high school and training them will be easier and quicker than teaching the much larger number of students. When the students have computers they are going to have questions that have to be answered about simple things they need to do every day. This will be easier if all teachers in our schools are already computer experts. Our teachers need to be EXPERTS at the use of technology or they will never deal with the questions successfully. That is truth.

I have a couple questions about that process of preparing teachers in Bertie County schools.

1. When are we going to place a projector driven by a computer (not a TV) in every classroom? When are we going to implement management communication processes that USE these computers effectively to manage our school system and immerse our teachers in using computers constantly? Projecting computer programs onto a screen visible to the entire class could allow for every single classroom to easily display a streaming message posted on the Bertie County web site. It is a powerful visual teaching tool. Every teacher could show it to their entire classroom and do it when convenient to do so for her classroom. There are hundreds of ways teachers can use this much more cost effective technology of projecting the computer onto a screen every day. This could be done at a fraction of the cost of the "Bright Futures" project and would be significantly more valuable to teaching our children, ALL OF OUR CHILREN, about technology and its use!

2. When are we going to implement training that assures every TEACHER uses email to communicate with central office, school administrators, each other and the parents of their children, each and every day of their school life? In any well run computer literate school system . . . email is the FIRST THING THAT A TEACHER SHOULD BE USING. They should be checking and using email 4 and 5 times a day, right in the classroom, right now. I have been told by our teachers, there is no program to institute email culture in our Bertie County schools, much less text message and chatting, the more advanced concepts of instant communication. Business has found USE of email with word processing and spreadsheets a powerful communications tool that is the basis to spreading computer understanding. Every single report and form the teachers submit should be done by email. Anything less than constant reliance on email means the teachers are unlikely to be computer literate at the level where they will spread the culture of computers effectively to our children.

A little research was done back when the school system was trying to get the county to spend millions of dollars for a truly ignorant county wide wireless system that would have had little value to getting high speed Internet into our student's homes. Why do I say it was ignorant? Research discovered that commercial efforts had already spread the availability of high speed Internet to over 70% of Bertie County homes (at a fraction of the cost per home that the school system was proposing). The school system's proposal only made sense in highly concentrated areas like the downtown of cities, not in a rural area like Bertie County. We need to keep working on getting that access to high speed Internet to the last 30%, but commercial ventures will do that without the county spending a fortune for a wireless solution that can only be deemed ignorant.

Even when we get to the point in an intelligent strategic process to spread computer knowledge to our children by giving them their own computers we need to make sure we use the technology that will be most valuable to the majority of them. I have posted earlier articles explaining why Apple is a questionable choice for this "Bright Futures" effort. Bertie County citizens need to understand that even in the technical world there are a number of people who passionately argue on both sides of the Apple versus Microsoft choice. Our school management cannot just listen to one side. They need to understand what this argument is about.

As an example, there is the argument about whether Apple has 6% or 12% of the marketplace. Apple has studies that they claim show they are getting 12% of new computer sales. However to get this they carefully exclude a great number of marketplaces that they say don't count. Even if they are right though, that still says Apple is a minor player. In the best of their view, they still lost out in 8 of every 9 sales to Microsoft. Their response is that anyone who doesn't buy Apple is simply stupid. Interesting attitude to say the least, but not compelling. It is consistent with the Apple simplistic and insulting ads they run on TV.

Apple also claims that they get 23% of school computer sales as if this is good. Compare that 23% to the nearly 80% they used to get. You have to ask, why have they lost so much market share to Microsoft? Doesn't that loss of market share say a lot about the relative value of Apple versus Microsoft?

Finally, the whole issue of Apple "Boot Camp" (which allows you to run Windows XP on the Apple computer) needs to be understood. Apple computers cost more than Windows and have significantly less software available. That is the only reason they are adding this "Boot Camp" capability. Since Apple is such a small player, many software companies do not find it worthwhile to bother creating Apple versions. Apple users find this frustrating. Apple's solution is to allow you to run Windows on the same machine to get access to this huge marketplace of software. The first version of "Boot Camp", their capability to run Windows on the same machine, only allowed you to run one OS at a time. This was not very convenient and considered a kluge by almost everyone. The new version allows you to run both OSes at the same time. Much better, but still quite expensive and it will always be SLOWER than running one OS at a time.

The real question is what is the impact over the long run. There are industry strategists that believe Apple has made a serious mistake. Since Apple hardware is always more expensive, and the "Boot Camp" capability makes it even less valuable for software firms to create an Apple version of their software, the long term market for Apple could get even smaller as less and less software is written for Apple. Why have a more expensive Apple with "Boot Camp" running Windows slower than it would by itself if you spend all your time in Windows XP anyway? It is also more complex and will burden all users with confusing complexity that adds no value. And Windows XP is the old Microsoft OS. When will Apple support Windows Vista, the future for Microsoft users?

As noted above, I have posted two previous articles on this issue, and they generated more comments than most of the articles posted on my blogs. Some Apple fans tried to make their case by criticizing my even asking the question about how well we chose. You can see my articles and the comments by clicking on the two links below.

http://bertiecounty.blogspot.com/2006/07/laptop-project-update-for-bertie.html
http://bertiecounty.blogspot.com/2006/08/apple-computer-has-new-sales-people.html

Computer technology is important. When I ran for the board of education, an adoption of technology was one of my 4 campaign platform issues. I still believe it is key to our children getting a great start in the modern world we live in. However a strategy that goes immediately for an expensive bottom up approach when we have not put into place the technology culture (at the teacher and administrator levels) that will allow this to succeed is more consistent with the failed practices of education bureaucrats on other issues. Throw money at the problem does not work. If one of the best managed companies in the world, GE, stopped this strategy because it does not work, what makes the Bertie County school system think it will work for them? We need to model our efforts on the top down approach.

Bertie County cannot afford this "throw money at the problem" solution that is the current strategy of the "Bright Futures" project.