Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire How much of that tech equipment does your school actually use?

A study in Idaho revealed that only half of the expensive computer tech stuff the state paid for is actually being used and by only about 2% of the students. I wonder how these numbers carry over to other states.



53 Percent of IEN Equipment Unused, Audit Says
IEN Takes First Step to Rebid School Broadband Contract

BOISE � The Idaho Education Network has released a Request for Information, the first step in rebidding the state�s beleaguered school broadba� Read more
Otter Calls to Rebid Broadband Contract, Fund Service with $8.9 Million

BOISE � More than half of the equipment provided by the Idaho Education Network�s school broadband program isn�t being used, an audit shows.

And though about 85,000 students in 217 high schools have access to the service, only 1,431 to 1,850 were using it any given semester from fall 2012 through last spring.

Only 38 percent of video teleconferencing codecs in the 30 schools sampled were being used, Legislative Audits Manager April Renfro told the Legislature�s Joint Finance Appropriations Committee on Thursday morning.

The flat-screen televisions and high-definition cameras were getting the most use, at 56 percent and 58 percent, respectively.

During the period audited, 34 to 50 school districts were providing IEN classes in any given semester. The number of IEN classes offered statewide ranged from 178 in the fall of 2012 to 128 last spring.

The state contracted with Fargo, N.D.-based Eide Bailly LLP, which has a Boise office, to help on the audit, which the Legislature requested last year to measure use of the $3.35 million in equipment the state bought with a mix of federal funds and money from the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation.

The schools sampled, spread evenly throughout Idaho, had 133 of the 1,048 pieces of IEN equipment, though eight pieces turned out to be missing.

However, six of those eight missing pieces of equipment have since been located, former state Sen. John Goedde, who is now a consultant to the IEN, wrote in a letter to JFAC responding to the audit.

Renfro cautioned against extrapolating too much from the data, as other districts probably use the equipment a lot. But, she said, consistently sparse use of the videoconferencing equipment is telling.

Goedde wrote that videoconferencing �is just one piece of the larger statewide area network,� comparing it to a highway that delivers a variety of courses and resources to classrooms.

�Many high school students utilize the bandwidth infrastructure provided (by) the Idaho Education Network in their classes every day,� he wrote. �Additionally, Idaho Digital Learning Academy has begun offering hybrid courses that incorporate synchronous [live] elements into their course content using Idaho Education Network videoconferencing equipment.�

Goedde wrote that use of the IEN rose from 2009 to 2012, but fell after that after the online course requirement associated with the Students Come First education laws was repealed.

The audit was requested before a court ruled that the state�s broadband contract with CenturyLink and Education Networks of America was invalid because Syringa Networks had been cut out of the work illegally.

The state is appealing this ruling while moving to rebid the contract. Renfro said the auditors might have asked different questions had they known how things would develop.

This session, the Legislature will consider Gov. C.L. �Butch� Otter�s request for another $8.9 million to fund the IEN through June 30, 2016.

The federal government used to fund three-quarters of the project with �e-rate� money from a surcharge on phone bills, but it stopped paying in 2013. The state sent school districts instructions last week on how to apply for e-rate money on their own.

Of 42 high schools that responded to the audit, 48 percent didn�t offer any videoconferencing classes in the 2013-14 school year, and 33 percent offered one to three.

Other schools used the technology for a mix of classes, college-credit courses, Idaho Digital Learning Academy offerings and virtual conferencing.

�There (are) a lot of different things they�re using the IEN for,� Renfro said. �I think that�s important to note.�

JFAC Co-Chairwoman Maxine Bell, R-Jerome, cited concerns that only about 2 percent of high school students use the service for IEN classes.

�This is not a question for you, Ms. Renfro, but it certainly did come before us, and it certainly is a question for this committee,� she said.

JFAC Co-Chairman Sen. Dean Cameron, R-Rupert, said he was proud to see districts in his area, Twin Falls and Cassia County, using the IEN to offer advanced courses.

But some districts are using it for classes such as Music Appreciation and the History of Rock �n� Roll.

�I love rock and roll, but I�m not sure that�s the purpose we intended (that) we�re spending millions of dollars on,� Cameron said.

State Rep. Steve Miller, R-Fairfield, said teachers at some schools he�s visited haven�t been trained adequately in how to use the equipment. At small schools, especially, teachers are busy and haven�t had time to learn.

The audit has raised several issues to review, Miller said. �We have an immense amount of opportunity here we�re not taking advantage of.�

Reads like they have done a pizz poor job of incorporating the "stuff" into the curriculum.

If its like a lot of our local districts, they have a lot of equipment purchased for them, but no one in the district that knows what to do with it or the network infrastructure to successfully utilize it.

My two that are still in HS have classes that are supposed to utilize e-textbooks. The problem is that there isn't enough bandwidth coming into the district to support all the classes that are supposed to use them. They can use the textbooks just fine at home, but not at school. Their "IT Dept" consists of two people at most and neither is up to the task of managing a large network spanning multiple locations. Several of us that work in the IT world have tried to offer some constructive suggestions, etc. It falls on deaf ears.

Oh boy.....

I am an IT Admin at a school district. I run the dept, basically.

The videoconferencing gear is gonna collect dust. Skype is too convenient and works too well for them to bother with those stupid codecs anymore. If those were purchased anytime in the last 5 years, it was a complete waste of money to do so. (I skimmed the article, forgive me if that info was mentioned.)

School IT is an interesting beast. I have two techs, one data person, and a secretary. And me. The district employes 370 people and services 2700 students. We field approximately 1500 end user devices.

I fight for budgets, try to help people understand why they can't pick out their own laptop when it's time to replace staff machines, try to keep things standardized (as much as possible) in equipment acquisitions, and guide district admin in decision-making for anything that impacts or is impacted by our IT systems. That's on the admin side. On the dept management side, I make sure that my folks have what they need, constantly look for free or low cost alternatives to anything we currently pay for, and work with skilled vendors to perform those tasks that we can't do within our staff. The place was a wreck when I got here two years ago.....I've been able to drag them into the 21st century, mostly, in those two years, but it's an uphill fight some days.

I've had "offers to help" from the community. Many are well intentioned, some come across as flat out rude, and a lot are just not feasible. While there are lots of seemingly great ways to get "free help," that often falls apart when you can't (and shouldn't) issue credentials to that volunteer help. Donations can be interesting, too, because I sort of HAVE to take them, but I've often had to spend sufficient money to make the donation work in our environment that I could have bought a different widget that does the same thing for less money and less aggravation than the donation wound up costing me.

As with anything, it looks one way from the outside and another from inside.

A lot of times, IT gear in schools goes unused because someone made a decision to have whatever is cool at the moment, no one had any curriculum developed to incorporate it, and so it was new and shiny for a while, then just sat unused thereafter. As we talk about new equipment here, my first question, to the annoyance of many, is "what does this support in the curriculum?" Followed by "how will this be implemented?" followed by "who is doing the training?" I simply don't have the people or the capacity to train teachers on classroom strategies. Usage, yes, curriculum/pedagogy, no. And that's where the wheels usually come off.....the curriculum people want nothing to do with learning how to use anything new, to include software, and the IT people are not in a position to teach classroom strategies, only general usage. Having formerly been a teacher, I do what I can to bridge the gap, but the problem is that I've been out of the classroom since about 2003. Life in there has changed somewhat.

Anyway, there's a quick peek inside the school IT world....

Back to work...

It's going to take some time to get it all integrated in.

tddeangelo,

That sounds about right.

Purchasing decisions here are made with little or no input from people that matter. They don't even have a real IT dept head. The pay for the job is pitiful. Anyone that has a decent resume wouldn't even apply for this position. The person that is handling all of it has little to no real world experience. They're not a bad person, but they are in over their head.

They get ill suited or out of date equipment and technologies dumped on their lap and then the administration can't understand why nothing works right. There is no master plan for the district. Everything is patched together with duct tape more or less. To add insult to injury, they do not understand that equipment/technology life cycles are measured in months - not years. As a consequence, the same crap still doesn't work years later. So much for technology.....

School Districts are obligated to spend every dime of taxpayer's money that is appropriated to them...otherwise, they're scared to death that if they don't...they won't get even more taxpayer's money appropriated to them the following year.

Aint that the truth.

Bear in mind, and Stush, I'm in PA as well, the average school IT expenditures fall in the 0.5-1.0% range, as a percentage of the total operational budget of the district. This is not inclusive of IT staff, but equipment/services expenditures. My budget is approx. 0.73% of the overall operating budget, for example.

PA districts especially are all over the map on how they structure, compensate, and handle their IT depts/needs. There are people who do my job in comparable districts and make 10-20% more than I do. There are people in much larger districts who make less. It's all negotiated with the individual. What is REALLY difficult is my staff are part of the same union as the custodians and secretaries. End result is that they are not well represented, as those folks could give a rip about a small handful of IT folks, who they think already make too much (because they make more than the secretaries and custodians...barely).

The outcome of that is a restrictive environment for me as the supervisor (example- my network tech is represented....can't keep him here if he doesn't want to be here for after-hours upgrades/emergencies). I cannot request additional compensation or a raise for them, and their hours/holidays make zero sense for the needs of their job. But, it is what it is.

To the article in question, the codecs for videoconferencing are yesterday's news, by a wide margin. I would be shocked if they WERE using them heavily. No one uses that stuff anymore when so many web or mobile device apps exist to do what "experts" were sure we'd be doing on codecs with ISDN lines, once upon a time, lol.

My next push here is to move into a lease cycle on equipment to stabilize the refresh cycle. Our board is receptive to it, so hopefully the pitch goes over well. I have teachers using laptops I got as refurbs to keep cost down and buy me 3-4 years to do something better. I replaced all the teachers' laptops in one shot, for $350/machine, to get business-class laptops. Even if I only get 2 years of service from them, we're doing ok, but they carry a 3 year warranty, so I'm planning to run them the full 36 months, hoping for 4 years if possible.

The big money fight this year for my budget will be for my core switch. No one sees it or understands what it does, so they'll want to cut the funds. I don't particularly want to run it to failure, as they won't like what happens if we do, but that'll fall on the powers that be if it's cut and then it dies. They can get along with out email/internet, right?

Put man on the moon with people educated in grade school on a black board.

See how many students are on smart phones during their unsupervised hours. There's a considerable difference between entertainment and learning, and today's focus is on entertainment.

My kid thought he was computer savey in high school, and that game related computer graphics would be fun and offer substantial returns as a career. He found out in short order that playing with electronics and working with electronics are completely different worlds. Rendering in 3D-space takes some skills he's not willing to develop. Result was instant college drop out. His loss and I got to retire 3 years early.

He's doing OK in the world now, but way short of potential.

I can see introducing high tech gear to students, but it should be like calculators in the 8th grade. Word processing in the 9th, spreadsheeets in the 10, writing code as juniors, and possibly multimedia as seniors. First off, they should be taught to use and rely on that bump between their shoulders. I hear there are actually some silicon valley schools that are going this route.

I had some graduate level college stats profs that did not allow calculators in the room durning exams. If ones derivations came down to the cube root of torn underware, he said write that down and you're good. His goal was to see if we could think as opposed to running a procedure from beginning to end.

Yup, and a cycle that we'd better BREAK,PDQ.

*Warehouse space being rented to store now AGED and obsolete tech gear in boxes that have never been opened ?

*World class HVAC / Air Handling systems whose condenser coils have NEVER been blown out, and whose squirrel cage blower bearings have NEVER seen grease ? ....changed out for newer poor quality at inflated prices ? The abused residue hauled away for scrap ?

*Miller Dynasty Welding invertors being sold off at crazy low prices to clear beneficiaries of nepotism and GRAFT (instructors)....only to be replaced with the SAME equipment ?

* 16th and 18th edition "revised" textbooks that are so hopelessly fouled with typos and misprints that the students are screwed from the outset,... $120 texts best used /suited to block up a car,.....

Been there / taught there (un-tenured)..... and I could go on.

GTC

As far as tech in the curriculum goes, they need to learn productivity software LONG before 9th or 10th grade. That's early middle school level stuff. I actually have been telling the folks here that we shouldn't be teaching applications past 8th grade. They should be USING applications beyond that point.

While in generations past, computer technolgy wasn't necessary, it sure is now. Everything from working at Mickey D's to applying for unemployment (ok, so maybe preparing them for that isn't high on the list...) to college classes to workforce skills requires some degree of interaction with computer technology. My father in law works in a steel mill, where they recently required employees to manage leave time and get their pay stubs on kiosks/personal computers. It didn't go over well, lol, but my point is even in that job where he doesn't use a computer much for work (he's in maintenance), he still needs to use one for some aspects of his work life.

I've generally tried to steer clear of gimmicky tech. Teachers gravitate toward it like kids to the impulse buy racks at the grocery store, but generally speaking, the teachers aren't prepared to teach with it, and the curriculum isn't adapted to it anyway.

In the past, I deviated a little from that in order to get Cisco Academy courses taught to high school students. I saw this as a huge opportunity for kids, so I jumped on it. I wound up getting "volunteered" to teach it (in addition to my IT support duties), but it was fun.

One of the best ways to make money is to come up with a product that you can convince schools that they must have. This is one of the easiest things there is to do. All you have to do is make the statement that what you have is new and innovative; schools will make Black Friday at Wal-Mart look like a polite encounter between two people on a wide sidewalk. The technology companies figured this out long ago.

The best statement I have ever seen about technology in the classroom was in one of Louis Sachar's books where the custodian shows up at a classroom with a computer. The teacher asks what she is supposed to do with it. The custodian says that his guess is that she is supposed to use it to teach the students. She drops it out the window and says, "That, children, is gravity."

Schools in PA, at least in the past, also go screwed on purchasing even the most basic of supplies.

They routinely overpaid for almost all items because of the requirement that they get multiple bids for large purchases and select the lowest bid. Sounds great on paper, but not so good in practice.

One of my dad's friends was in charge of purchasing the basic school supplies that the district used - notebooks, pens, etc. The issue arose when getting bids. He could go to the local office supply house or Kmart and buy those items in bulk. The problem was that those places either didn't do bids, or weren't on the approved bidder list. SMH.

So instead of getting decent notebooks for a few pennies, they paid premium prices for garbage newsprint tablets that mostly ended up in trash. I suspect that the same thing goes on with regard to all purchases today.

I remember back when the current, hand-wringing "What are our schools doing wrong at this moment?" issue was the fear that the Soviets were winning the space race because of the inadequacy of our schools.
The government came to the conclusion that not enough was being spent on science equipment. (Even then, it was common knowledge that science and math were the only subjects that had any importance whatsoever.) A program was instituted that provided impressive amounts of federal money to purchase said equipment. One of my teachers showed me a catalog from the previous year and the one for the current year from the same company. Amazingly enough, the prices had all gone up in the neighborhood of 100%.

I feel your pain. Working in the IT department of a medium-small hospital chain, substitute "doctor" and "department directors" for your students and school admin types and the analogy fits too closely.

Our CIO had to fight tooth and nail to try to stop individual departments from buying software and hardware off the shelf "like they were buying cereal" and then expecting us to make it work in a large integrated environment.


Kind of like all shooters at a public range on sight in days are all-knowing experts in firearms - everybody that owns a lap top is a high tech expert...

Technology comes and goes rather quickly. I remember when I was chosen to get a "21st Century Classroom". Instead of building a lab, the school system chose a few teachers whom the system thought would use the technology to get the bundles. The bundle consisted of a teacher set up and four or five student stations along with appropriate software. Imagine what happened the next year when the kids went back into an old fashioned no tech classroom. I also remember getting on the admin's schit list for not buying a Laser Disc player and some of the overpriced discs. It was obvious that the CD Rom was already killing the Laser Disc, but no, every other teacher was getting a Laser Disc, so I had to have one too.

Some of the Admins would go to a conference and buy bundles of hardware and software, sometimes the year's budget worth, and come back to bestow the stuff on the teachers. The admin's couldn't believe the teachers did not want the over-priced, worthless stuff. Money wasted from the get-go. Even when the software/hardware was useful, there was usually no training for the teachers. Training cost money and money should be used for more software/hardware. The perception was that technology was just another straw on the camel's back and more work for the teachers without any other responsibility being removed to make room for it.

Excellent post, Leon.

Part of Idaho's problem is that they have replaced teacher to student ratio with giving each student a tablet or laptop. I don't think that a single person on this forum had high school core classes like History, Mathematics and Science classes of 45 students to 1 teacher. Those Codecs allow teachers to teach distance delivery classes of three or four sections of students with an aide doing the attendance and support roles. Distance delivery classes can be very good but they can be a hot mess as well. High ratios are getting more common than what people think. Students who think original thoughts are largely crushed by classical conditioning at an early age and forced into correspondence. At my school we have 35 certified teachers, 45 educational support staff, 8 janitorial staff, 10 administrators and their support staff for a school of 1000 students. My average class size is 29 students per class. That is considered a low number in present times. The huge number of administrators and ITT Curriculum Content Coaches are given by the Priss's educational program to provide grants for support personnel rather than lowering the teacher to student ratio. This is part of a process that is being worked into the system by Dems that I call "Little Red Father". PLCs and SLOs and other common elements drive the entire system to conformity. It will not be nice in public education in 10 years.

Sincerely,
Thomas