The Ontario Knowledge Network for Learning wants to know the pulse of parents with regard to IT in parent/school communications. Here's my answer ...

Thank you for including the parents on this survey, and also thanks for allowing us to respond via a modern technology ;)

1. Do we use technology to communicate with our school?

   Yes, the telephone. That's the same level of communications integration we used back when I was in Kindergarten. If the school does have an email, we've never been told of it. I know the board has email, but generally ignores it for weeks.

   Wait! It gets better! How does the school communicate with us? By notes, printed leaflets they tuck into our kids' schoolbags ... just like they did when grandma was in gradeschool! Good to know at least one side of the equation is learning!

2. Do I agree that technology would help increase communications?

   On it's own, no.

   

   To be effective, the technology must be integrated into the lifestyle of the participants. You can't simply dump a complex and completed solution in place and expect compliance.

   Remember FirstClass? I do. To be effective, you must grow this organically, and when you have a school system where almost none of the teachers can use email effectively, is it any wonder the kids are unimpressed and the parents are frustrated?

   
   
3. What technology would I choose?

   Again, technology is not the issue, not by itself. First we need a cultural shift where the teachers are prepared for email and the schoolboard allots them time for it. If teachers have to answer my email on their own time, you're not going to get much compliance, and unless they see the value of it in their workplace, it's doom for you and I to foist it on them.

   Now, if it was accepted by the teachers, what would I want to use to communicate with them? Same as I use with my own clients:

   • email and mailing lists
   • instant messaging
   • regular group meetings on IRC
   • regular status reports via a web journal
   

   My goal, as Emperor of Education, would be to ask teachers and parents to talk to each other, to have teachers talk to other teacher's pupil's parents, parents talk to parents, everybody, all together. We just need to foster the pretext for lines of communications: We get more business done at the craft-show than at probably any other event. Digitize that.

4. Are there obstacles?

   Yes, and I believe I've already listed them but they bear repeating: Teachers must be allotted time to communicate and teachers must accept the technology as useful in their workplace.

5. Are there successful methods in place?

   In-person advisory board meetings.

   What would I change?

   Move these online so the notes and materials can be archived.

6. What types of technology would I feel is best for communications with the school?

   See (3) for starters.

7. Should technology (and by that I know they mean specifically Microsoft technology ... with a bare sprinkle of Apple) play a key role in my child's classroom learning?

   No.

   

   "Technology should serve the body, not enslave the mind," and when we now know from SEC documents that 85% of the money the schoolboards pay towards Windows licenses is pure profit for the world's richest corporation, I think it's wasting our money and sending the wrong message to the children.

   When we teach our children to be passive consumers of a proprietary technology, we enslave their minds.

   That is wrong. It's immoral and it's a mistake.

   Should transparent technology (and by that I mean those technologies we are permitted to own, to take apart, change, re-form and re-apply by our own whim and in that category I can include all sorts of technologies, from the aircraft and automobile to the computer hardware and software, to the fine points of grid computing and the internet itself) should any of this be part of the curriculum?

   Absolutely, so long as we remember there are two types of knowledge, gnosis and epistimon; technology per-se is squarely in the second category of those dry things we can learn by rote to enumerate, whereas it is the fluid and human knowledge of the first category that is the ultimate goal of education.