Well it's official. I will retire at the end of this school year. This was not the original plan. I had always figured that I would stay another year or two. But when the technology coordinator position was abolished, the handwriting was on the wall. I was offered two other positions, but they would not have been as challenging or satisfying, so I decided to leave the district.
I am looking forward to retirement. With so many hobbies waiting for me (genealogy, beadwork, gardening, calligraphy, digital photography, and more), I will get up in the morning and choose which ones to work on that day. With my computer skills there are other part-time opportunities I could pursue, like consulting and web site design.
I will miss many things about teaching: the company of children, the camaraderie of my colleagues, the challenge of solving problems. Most of all I will miss the joy of helping someone understand something new, of showing how computers can help with individual creativity, of guiding children into the digital world.

I still don't know what I'll be doing next year, which is making it very hard to plan. Since I know that I won't be the technology coordinator any more I am starting to think about handing pieces of my job off to the administrators who will be doing it. Someone will need to do the state-mandated database reporting; someone else will need to manage our large website; someone will do the staff development, hardware troubleshooting, budget and ordering, multimedia taping and scanning and printing, and so on. At least I hope that someone takes over these jobs. I hate to think that our technology program will dwindle away without someone to keep tabs on all the pieces of it. On the other hand, no one is indispensable.
On a happier note, check out our newly-redesigned website at www.rumson.k12.nj.us. It is more usable, with a drop-down navigation bar, and more attractive, with some beautiful pictures around the district.

We are busy working on a new three-year technology plan, which must be submitted to the state for approval in mid-April. It is tougher this year than it's been in the past, with more uncertainty about where the money will come from and who will be around to make the plan work. At least the goals are still the same: to help the students learn and the teachers teach. We know that we need more staff development to help them feel comfortable with technology. We know that we need to keep our network and computers updated and running smoothly. We have a vision of people using tablet pc's and projectors and SmartBoards and digital cameras and so forth. We can only hope that the money will be there to support this vision!

I've gotten behind with my postings here, since things have been in some upheaval at school. We are in a budget crunch, and the administration has been forced to make some tough choices. One of their proposals is to eliminate the job of technology coordinator as a full-time position. This means that I might be reassigned for next year, in ways that won't be clear for several more weeks. So I am trying to get things done with a great cloud of uncertainty about the future.

Computers are supposed to be good at remembering things, right? So how come they force us to remember so much stuff. Web page addresses, PIN’s, e-mail addresses, user names and passwords, buttons, menus, commands… All we want to do is get the information that we know is out there, but sometimes the computer can be a balky tool.

I teach my students how to use the programs, where to find the commands, how to format the text, how to add new slides, how to put the keywords in the search box and how to put the address in the address box. But I don’t really teach them how to use the computer as a tool for managing their information. That really won’t make any sense to them until they start using their computer to manage their bank account, sign up for health benefits, download music, file correspondence, shop, subscribe to online newspapers, and maintain three different e-mail accounts. That’s when it gets tough.

You know that you’re not supposed to use the same user name and password for everything although it’s so tempting to do so. You’ve heard the argument: if one site is compromised, all of your passwords are compromised. (Although I’ve never understood what good it would do a hacker to log into the New York Times under my subscription.)

So you try to use different ones, especially for the financial sites. Sometimes a site forces you to choose a different password. It took me three tries last week to sign up for the Cornell online site for alumni because it insisted that the password have at two numbers and both upper-case and lower-case letters. None of my usual passwords fit the bill, and I had to invent one specifically for this logon. What are the chances that I will actually remember that password the next time I want to log on there? Somewhere between tiny and non-existent.

The good news is that I discovered a solution, and I really love it because it is so simple and low-tech. I bought a set of little file cards, smaller than the usual 3x5 card. Each one feels like just the right size for one piece of information, like a user name and password. They come with a little Lucite box with tab dividers for alphabetizing and sit neatly on a shelf on my desk. A low-tech solution for a high-tech problem.

Here’s a fantasy view of how people will someday interact with their computers. The professor walks into his elegant pad, tosses off his jacket and opens his sleek silver computer (with no visible wires, of course). Then he chats with the helpful assistant who lives on the screen, They have a conversion about phone messages, the prof’s schedule for the rest of the day, journal articles that are relevant to his lecture topic, and some online data that he can use for the lecture (which he had put off preparing until the last minute). The assistant knows that the journal article was published by “your friend Jill”. He speaks in perfectly natural English.

I didn’t make this up, of course. This vision is taken from a video created by Apple Computer back in 1987, and widely shown at conferences and meetings for several years afterwards. It was called “Knowledge Navigator”. It blew me away when I first saw it and still does. So what’s going on here and why does this still seem so impressive, even years later?

On the one hand it’s just a talking interface for programs we are already comfortable with. The assistant was reading the phone messages, which a number of programs can already do. He described the schedule for the day, which could be stored in Outlook or another PIM. He searched through web pages based on a couple of keywords. On the other hand, it has some features that are still a long way off. The assistant paraphrased the content of the phone messages instead of reading them. His speech recognition is impeccable. Even more impressive, the speech synthesis is smooth and non-robotic. I wonder whether that might be the hardest nut for artificial intelligence to crack.

So why am I thinking about this in the context of teaching children to use computers? The reality is that the friendly assistant will not be here for a while. Most of what we input into our computers is still through typing and clicking. I teach children to learn keyboarding, to click on menus and buttons, and to double-click on icons, not to speak at their computer. Fundamentally I teach them that they are still smarter than computers, which is the opposite of the message of the Knowledge Navigator. By the way, you can watch the video on the Digibarn website, a wonderful museum of all things digital.

It's been the strangest winter. First it looked as though we weren't going to have any winter at all, with abnormally warm weather persisting through the holidays and into January. Then we got hit with the big ice storm last week. It only affected a narrow band of towns along the coast here in New Jersey, but it did tremendous damage, coating our trees with a thick layer of ice that pulled down branches everywhere. Our schools were closed for two days because the power was out. You can't run a school without power! The custodial crew did a heroic job of clearing the walkways so that we could all get in and out safely on Friday. Everybody pitched in to make the school day as normal as possible. Now we're still trying to catch up with the days we missed.