What our parents think of technology (2013 edition)

For the past four years, we have conducted a short on-line survey with our parents regarding technology in our district.  Here’s a quick summary of the results…

Download the full copy of the survey results including all comments. (pdf file)

Sample comments regarding things that are going well…

Infinite Campus, daily announcements, and the new district website!

Infinite Campus is a great tool. Being notified of outstanding assignments is very
beneficial to keeping us on track at home.

I love the daily messenging system so that we, as parents, hear the same
announcements the kids.

Love the Campus Portal App!

Sample comments regarding suggestions for improvement…

I think Infinite Campus is a great tool IF the teachers use it.

The number of iPads in their classrooms differs significantly. My son at FM has 5 iPads in his room and my daughter at HD has only one. That seems a bit discrepant to me.
[Note from Brian: This is correct, there is a different between rooms/schools and this is a goal of our this coming year to start leveling the access to iPads]

That we have infinite campus- but teachers need to update more frequently.
Shouldn’t be a week or 2 before grades are entered. I can’t guide my student
when I don’t have current info.

Infinite campus is a great tool for us as long as it is updated in a timely manner
and the due dates are accurate (the latter is usually more of the problem).

When the anouncements are sent, I’d like to see the main topic in Bold under
categories. Example: HELP NEEDED or CHOIR NEWS – there is so much
information that I would like to scan the page to find the information that is
relevent to us in a word or two.

As a whole, we don’t use technology well. Sometimes we over use it, such as
with general announcements and activities announcements.

Make the announcements readable everyday and not an attachment to open to
view….

I strongly DISLIKE that the emails now are just PDF’s that need to be opened to read. Takes too long to open them on my phone. [Note from Brian: Although many schools still choose to send announcements as PDFs, many are also now sending a link to webpage where the same announcements are posted.]

It would be nice if the email messages could be further refined or consolidated. I
average 4-5 messages per day from the schools (I have three children at three
different schools).

Many teachers don’t consistently update Infinite Campus which makes it
frustrating for the student and parents to know exactly how their kids are
performing in each class.

I would like to see better use of the grade book. Students should be able to use
it as a planner to see what tests and projects are coming up and help them stay
organized.

It would be really nice if the district could offer some online courses for students,
especially specialty ones or high level academic ones that could be completed in
the summer.

Using an Apple TV and a Flickr account to automate the display of student art work

The walls of our district offices are filled with student art – and I love that, but I’d really like to enable even more student art work to be on display.  So I spent some time yesterday connecting a Flickr account to a TV display.  The idea of is simple….  An art teacher could use a standard Flickr account (www.flickr.com) to store photos of student projects.  If they create a set (sort of like a folder) of specific photos/projects, we can target that specific set to be displayed on a TV.  The teacher could then control which photos are on display at our offices and the TV would take care of automatically running the slide show.

We’ll most likely add some extra TVs for art work displays this fall, and my guess is that several of our schools will also be using the idea to display extra art work in their hallways.

Here’s the setup and tricks that we found related to it….

We used an Apple TV ($99) and an HDMI cable to connect to the TV.  Of course, the TV also has to have an HDMI connection.  Connect the Apple TV to the wireless network, then go to setting to make sure the Apple TV is set to never sleep.  In the screen saver settings, select Flickr for your screen saver, connecting to the specific Flickr account and set of photos you want to display.  I then set the display mode to random, which means that the way the photos are displayed will change approximately every hour.  For the Start After setting, I set it to 2 minutes, meaning that if someone activates the Apple TV, the slide show will automatically kick back in after 2 minutes.  I’ve let the screen saver run for several days on a TV display and so far it seems to run well and doesn’t ever break from the screen saver mode.  Looking forward to seeing more student art work….

UPDATE:  In further testing, we found that if the Apple TV is running continuously, then it doesn’t receive any new pictures that the teacher uploads to Flickr.  However, we solved that with a simple Christmas tree timer.  We set the timer to turn the Apple TV off each night at 1am for a few minutes, then power it back on.  As soon as its back on, it takes 2 minutes for slide show to kick back on and at that time it will look to Flickr to update all the photos.