Meet New CETPA Director Tim Landeck

By Lisa Kopochinski, DataBus Editor

What will be your responsibilities as a CETPA director?

I hope to be an asset to the organization and its membership in numerous ways, but specifically I will be working with the CTO Mentor program steering committee, CETPA’s involvement and resources connected to SBAC/CCSS and much more. Being new to the board this year I am sure there will be many things for me to learn and be involved with. It is an exciting time for educational technology and CETPA and I am very pleased to be involved with an excellent organization and outstanding board of directors!

What are your responsibilities as director of technology services for the Pajaro Valley Unified School District?

Anything that plugs in, I have something to do with it! Really, like many people in a position of technology leadership, I oversee all things technical — both information technology and instructional technology. Fortunately I have an amazing team of people who help to make it all happen — from networking infrastructure to professional development — it takes a strong team to support and implement with fidelity. We accomplish so much with so little that some day we may be able to do everything with nothing.

How long have you been in the computer industry?

I came into the computer industry via the educational environment. I have been involved with education since 1989 when I began teaching a fifth-grade classroom in the same district I work in today. I enjoyed teaching very much, but when I acquired a 1200 baud modem to connect at what was then considered lightning speeds to my favorite BBS and FTP sites, my interests began to include technology and ways to integrate it into my daily curriculum. When Mozilla Netscape hit my computer screen, I knew I would soon move into a more technology-focused role. After a total of nine years in the classroom, I moved to a technology coordinator position at the Santa Cruz County Office of Education for two years. We were rolling out mobile multimedia labs to school sites that included laser disks and a Mac IIci on each cart. A couple years later I moved to Santa Cruz City Schools as technology director for three years where I pushed technology integration and technical support for the instructional side of the environment. I gained a good feel for the challenges of a divided technology support system where instructional support needs were secondary to all IT (AKA SASIxp and Financials) needs. When I moved to the Alisal Union School District in Salinas, I was technology director in charge of all things technical in the district, both IT and educational technology. At this point, I received a good lesson in managing firewalls and web content filters, switches and routers, wireless access points and electric pencil sharpeners (yes, really!) I came back to Pajaro Valley Unified School District eight years ago and have lived, learned and laughed over all things technical ever since.

What do you like most about the industry?

I really enjoy two components of technology in education; the first is the ability to easily communicate and connect with many people on a daily basis and to keep informed about the industry and the world in general. With the assistance of numerous technology tools, I am able to connect with everyone from my administrative assistant across the hall to my high school buddy living in Hong Kong. I can keep up to date with blogs and websites and do my best to address the hundreds of emails coming my way each day.

The second thing that I love about educational technology is that I never have a boring day! Technology and education is always changing and with it comes new approaches to instruction and challenges to make all the boxes and wires play well together. As Common Core comes barreling into the elevated priorities of my superintendent and the fastest wireless access points and new Chromebooks become available my head turns in new directions. My days are filled with troubleshooting systems and processes and looking for ways to continue to “do more with less.” The endless pilot projects that introduce new tools and strategies into the classroom are always a challenge, yet show the desire for educational improvement. It is great to implement these refined solutions that help increase student engagement while reducing technical requirements.

When did you join CETPA and why?

I first went to a CEDPA conference sometime around 2003. I believe there were a few hundred people in attendance and I was attracted to the idea of an educational technology conference where network engineers and technology directors would be in attendance. I had been to a few CUE conferences and although they were excellent and full of resources, I was looking for something with a few more hard core techies on campus. Once I went to my first CEDPA conference, I haven’t missed one since! I joined the listserv and my PLN grew by hundreds of people immediately and my access to others in the same boat as me meant I was not always recreating the digital wheel.

What past roles have you held within CETPA?

I have written a few articles that were published in DataBus and I have presented sessions at the annual conference. I have been a CTO mentor since the first cohort, which has been a fabulous experience for me on many levels. I look forward to being even more involved with CETPA over the next few years while being on the board.

Where does CETPA need to grow?

CETPA is growing! Membership and conference attendance numbers continue to climb as do strategic partnerships and CETPA initiatives. I am very pleased to have an opportunity to help keep this momentum moving forward and to usher in additional creative and effective programs and partnerships that members will find valuable. I am hoping to see more CETPA regional groups emerge and an expansion of strategic partnerships.

What is the greatest challenge facing the industry and how can it be overcome?

Budget continues to be a challenge for all educational institutions. I believe we are faced with a continuing increase of technical requirements yet not enough resources to meet the demand. As the understanding and appreciation for instructional technology increases, I believe we will see an increase in the number of resources dedicated to sustaining and improving infrastructure and access to educational technology tools.

What do you like to do in your limited spare time?

Triathlons are my physical passion and challenge. You might find me in the pool at 6:00am prior to work or the ocean in January for a cool 40-minute swim around the Santa Cruz wharf. Running on the beach or in the Redwoods is a great way for me to shed the stress of the day and bicycling up Highway 1 along the coast or down a muddy, mountainous single track brings a sense of satisfaction and excitement that is hard to express in words. Combine these experiences while trying to beat your time from a previous triathlon event and you may get a feel for the crazy world of multi-event races. Certainly spending time with my amazing family and hanging with my buddies are a high priority for my other limited spare time. Making time for these passions is a critical component to my life and I try to avoid living the John Lennon lyric “Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.”

About the Author:

Lisa Kopochinski has been the editor of DataBus magazine for more than 10 years. She can be reached at 916-481-0265 or at lisakop@sbcglobal.net.

Meet New CETPA Director Max Eissler

What will be your responsibilities as a CETPA director?

As a newbie to the board, my specific responsibilities aren’t fully defined yet, but I will be supporting Aaron Barnett in a number of membership experience areas, such as the continuing expansion of regional groups and the implementation of the new membership management system. I will also be supporting Sean Rozell in setting up the technology, labs and shootouts for the 2014 conference in Sacramento. Of course, I will always be looking for ways to help further the advance of educational technology and support our members as they fight the good fight every day in their institutions.

What are you responsibilities as chief technology officer for the Martinez Unified School District?

As CTO for the district, it’s my job to guide the district in sustainable technology adoptions that prepare our students for success in the twenty-first century. This doesn’t just mean building a working computer network. It means leading the staff in the kinds of cultural changes necessary to effectively integrate technology in the classroom. It also means insuring that teachers have the necessary training and skills to use the technology tools that we provide.

Because we are a smaller district, I wear a lot of hats. I am responsible for keeping our extensive technology infrastructure running, which includes ubiquitous high-speed wireless and 1:1 computing in all 4^th to 12^th grade classrooms. It also includes phones, security cameras, HVAC controllers, clocks, bells and the paging system. I am also the district’s CBEDS coordinator, I manage the Erate program, and the Medi-Cal Administrative Activities Program, in addition to more traditional technology department-mandated reporting activities like CalPads. Fortunately, I have a great team.  The staff at Martinez is the most intelligent and dedicated group of professionals I have worked with in my career.

How has the industry changed since you first started working in technology in 1990?

I think the technology landscape of 1990 would be unrecognizable to anyone under the age of 30. The World Wide Web had just been invented, but was not really in use yet. Those of us who did “go online” did so by dialing up AOL or Compuserve on our 2,400 baud modems. If we were lucky, we had a whopping transfer speed of 14.4 kilobits per second. That’s about 1/1,300 the bandwidth that I average on my cell phone today. Transferring data on the mainframe computer where I worked required the use of an eight-inch floppy disk, which stored about 1 MB of data. We rarely filled a disk. Today, that disk wouldn’t be large enough to store a single photo from my cell phone. The 802.11 wireless standard didn’t come out until almost a decade later, so mobile computing wasn’t even an option. The technology world we lived in at the time was made up of a series of isolated islands with little communication or interconnection outside your organization.

The world today is connected in ways that we could barely imagine back then. We have instant access to information everywhere we go. The challenge to those entering the workforce today isn’t finding the information they need, it’s curating the most pertinent and accurate information from the huge variety of resources available. This interconnectedness also allows us to communicate and collaborate in ways that were never really possible before. In coming decades, the ability to work collaboratively in the workplace will be an essential, expected skill in all professional careers, and educational leaders are recognizing that we have an obligation to equip our students with these skills. This has placed educational technology in a prominent position throughout the developed world.

What past roles have you held within CETPA?

I have been a CETPA member for close to a decade and a half, and have presented at the conference a few times over the years. This will be my fourth year as a mentor in the CTO mentor program. This fantastic program has allowed me to work with some very gifted people who will be the future leaders of our field. I am also one of the co-founders and now past-chair of the CETPA East Bay Area Technology Group.

Where does CETPA need to grow?

I recently attended my first CETPA board meeting where I learned about the many initiatives already underway. The board has an ambitious roadmap for the coming year. I think that we are right on track for appropriate and sustainable growth, and our members will be pleased with the changes they see. As an organization, I’d like us to continue to expand the reach of our regional groups, and our outreach to higher education. I’d also like us to continue to expand our advocacy efforts. I know that many districts are finding money to purchase new technology for CCSS using a variety of sources such as LCFF and the one-time Common Core funding. But three or four years from now, when it’s time to refresh those technologies, they may run into problems if renewable funding sources haven’t been identified.

What is the greatest challenge facing the industry and how can it be overcome?

As I mentioned earlier, finding ways to sustainably fund technology initiatives will be a hurdle many educational leaders will face, particularly in the public school sector. I think that a bigger problem for many, though, will be shifts in the industry that will force them to rethink their management roles.

We’ve been discussing the changes that are occurring in the classroom for years. We’ve talked about how our teachers must shift from being “dispensers of information” to “facilitators of learning.” A similar shift is occurring in the technology field. There was a time that access to technology resources was tightly controlled and staff would only use “approved” technology devices with “approved” software. The tech department had complete control of the computing experience. They were effectively the “dispensers of technology.”

Those days are gone. The widespread implementation of broadband internet access in our schools, combined with the advances in cloud-computing technologies, mean that staff can find many different online programs to meet their needs. The number of useful learning resources available through the Internet today is more than a tech director or even an entire tech department can keep up with. If the tech department tries to limit access to only the resources that they have previously reviewed and put on their “approved” list, then they are severely limiting the potential of technology in their classrooms.

The explosion of cloud-based resources is also making the particular device platform less relevant; tech departments are feeling more and more pressure to become device-agnostic and allow staff and students to use a variety of computing platforms.

Those who continue to function as “dispensers of technology” will quickly find themselves marginalized and eventually made irrelevant as staff find ways to go around them to access the technologies that they want and need. The challenge for tech leaders today is to find ways to maintain the necessary controls, such as those that are truly needed for CIPA compliance and security, while accommodating staff needs to be able to quickly adopt new technologies and learning resources. They will have to find ways to be guides rather than gatekeepers.

This is particularly difficult in the public school sector where we must comply with an outdated regulatory infrastructure. I think CETPA has shown great leadership in the legislative arena and I hope to become more involved in this over the coming year.

About the Author:

Lisa Kopochinski has been the editor of DataBus magazine for more than 10 years. She can be reached at 916-481-0265 or at lisakop@sbcglobal.net.

The Debilitating Effects of Micromanagement

By Bob Blackney

At some point in every person’s career, you get to work with a micromanager: the person who tries to control everything that happens in a school or office. Micromanagers have excessive attention to details and avoid delegation of tasks and decisions to staff members. The parody of the micromanager is the leader who spends the better part of their day counting the office supplies used. While the micromanager often believes they are doing a great job and are very structured, they are most often oblivious to the effects they have on the rest of the organization. In the best situations, micromanagement is an impediment to progress and, in extreme cases, it can cause the organization to stagnate.  Let’s look at the some of the effects that come with micromanagement.

Chief Technology Officer (CTO) micromanagement prevents innovation. Employees cannot come up with new ideas and procedures on their own; they have to constantly check with the micromanager, who is often unavailable. Workers become “drones” that wait to be told what to do rather than take risks that come with innovation. Employees with skills and knowledge will leave such situations and the organization is left with workers who are content to wait to follow instructions.

CTO micromanagement slows workflow, as all approvals have to go through the manager who will not give up control. It is not efficient for normal work to have to wait for approval from an overzealous manager. Delegation is an essential element in the work of any organization and it is an essential skill for any manager.

CTO micromanagement prevents an organization from using the talents and skills of the staff.  Employees are hired because they have the knowledge and ability to do a job. If they are constantly being hovered over by an oppressive manager, they cannot do the jobs they were hired to do.

CTO micromanagement creates a “wait to be told” culture. Why do work ahead of time if the micromanager will change everything? Better for employees to just wait until the deadline approaches and then do the job. There will be far less time to have to make changes and redo the work. Everyone in the organization learns to wait until it has to be done and then do what you are told to do.

CTO micromanagement slows progress because meetings must contain the micromanager.  Workers learn that if the micromanager has not “signed off” on the project there is no use moving forward unless it is done exactly the way the micromanager wants it done.

CTO micromanagement retards communication within a school or office and the community. When someone asks a question, workers will often reply, “I’ll have to check with my manager.” Employees should be able to respond to coworkers and with the community without being held hostage. If the answer is not correct, then it can be corrected.

CTO micromanagement discourages teamwork. Workers don’t work together; they just have to work with the micromanager. I have heard work groups say, “What’s the use of getting together to plan when we will just have to change it all.”  This is not how an efficient organization runs.  Managers should encourage everyone in the organization to constantly be innovating, communicating and improving and this cannot be done if the manager cannot delegate and respect the work of his or her employees.

In some situations, the micromanager will assign work and then micromanage the work to enable the oppressive manager to take credit for any positive results, and also to blame the employee for negative results. In this scenario, the micromanager actually delegates the accountability for failure to the worker without giving them the ability to take initiative that might have made the project a success.

Are you a micromanager?

According to Alyssa Gregory (visit http://sbinformation.about.com/od/businessmanagemen1/a/small-business-micromanagement.htm) ask yourself the following questions.  If the answers are “yes,” then you may be over managing that area.

• You have more work than you can handle because you can’t delegate effectively.
• You frequently assign work, then take it back because it’s not getting done the way you want it done.
• You tell your team exactly how you want things done and leave them no room for them to take initiative.
• You continuously take on project manager roles, even when there already is a project manager.
• You rarely complete projects on time because you can’t get past the details.
• You need to know what everyone is doing—all the time.
• Your team avoids you and all one-on-one conversations with you.
• You don’t let any of your team members contribute ideas, communicate with clients or even talk to each other.
• You become the bottleneck because everyone is always waiting for your approval on everything.
• Your team has unreasonably high turnover.
• You question the processes followed, work completed and proposed next steps at every status meeting.
• You feel that if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

Micromanagement disables a school or office in countless ways. All managers should be careful not to fall into the traps of over-managing. The damage that comes with micromanagement is not easily or quickly corrected.

 About the Author

Bob Blackney is the Director of Curriculum and Instruction with the Azusa Unified School District and can be reached at (626) 858-6194 or bblackney@azusa.org.

 

Thinking Must Be Done At 30,000 Feet

By Rolland Kornblau

A wise chief technology officer once told me: “As a CTO, you no longer work.”  I didn’t understand. I have been working since the age of 15 when I was able to get my work permit in high school. Even before that I was a paperboy and mowed lawns. I know how to work, have an exceptional work ethic, and even take my work home with me evenings and weekends to my family’s chagrin. I really do not know how not to work.

As a “working” technology director of a K8 school district, I am still called upon to work on anything from a network port replacement to a router configuration. I am also tasked with the department schedule, paperwork and management. I suppose if I didn’t have a passion for technology, it would be a bit overwhelming. Having said that, my team and I tend to keep everything going quite well, but all of this is work. How do I not work?

Actually, I was focusing on the verb instead of the noun—work. What my mentor was trying to tell me was that the work he was referring to was physical work. Physical work is the act of personally doing things. Since there are only 24 hours in a day, we all have a finite amount of time to get things done. By doing the work ourselves, we are limited to the hours available. If, however, we manage the work, we can get more done. I will leave the management and leadership discussion to another article at this point, just suffice to say that we cannot do everything ourselves.

In order to manage a workload, one must think. It is difficult to think big picture when you are in the midst of working. If you have ever been stuck on a problem without being able to figure out a resolution, then you can relate. Then, by some circumstance of interruption or frustration, you walk away from the problem, the resolution magically appears. What happened there is that you quit working long enough to think. If we compare this action to flying in an airplane, the higher your elevation, the greater your scope of vision and the more of the picture you see. Working would be done at 5,000 feet, while thinking must be done at 30,000.

The hands on gives us the experience and perspective, but the thinking allows us to go beyond and analyze for a greater outcome. My revelation was not that a CTO no longer works, because in fact they often work harder. It was that a CTO no longer gets the chance for hands-on experiences as he must raise his perspective higher to be able to meet the challenges of leadership needed in the position. Once I completed the California Educational Technology Professionals Association CTO Mentor program, this information was validated. Not only does a CTO have to think more, but must be a visionary leader that is willing to embrace change using any and all resources available.  As a CCTO, I am tasked with leading my organization higher since I am now thinking at 30,000 feet.

About the Author:

Rolland Kornblau is the Director of Technology for the Whittier City School District in Whittier, California.  He has been in Educational Technology for over 15 years and holds an MPA.  He is a CCTO, ACSA and TechSETS Advisory Committee member.  A proud founding member of the Whittier Area Technology Leaders (WATL), he can be reached at rolland@whittiercity.net.