VARtek Blog

Dick and Rick Hoyt are not likely names you recognize.  But if I ask if you've ever heard of the dad that competes in Ironman triathlons, all with his quadriplegic son in tow (literally in a boat, on the front of a bike, and in a custom made running wheel chair), I might ring a few bells.  You may have even seen their pictures:  Hoyt Family Photos   Dick Hoyt had been told by doctors, shortly after his son Rick was born, to put him in an institution; that Rick would never be anything more than a vegetable.  He was told that Rick would never have a “normal life” let alone a magnificent one.  And although Dick had been a high school athlete, he had long since hung up his sneakers for a life in military leadership.  He wasn’t prepared mentally or physically to raise his severely handicapped son. To see “Team Hoyt” now, all grown up, you would see the power and joy shared by this father/son duo as they compete in the most rigorous athletic competitions in the world.  You would note the seeming effortlessness of Dick as he strides out of the water carrying Rick whose body gyrates...

I look back on the beginning of my career in technology and I have to laugh.    I had grown up in a home that didn’t have a computer until late in the 1990’s.  In fact, my exposure to computers had pretty well been limited to a high school keyboarding class.  Beginning college, I avoided the use of email as a means to communicate, opting instead for phone calls, hand written letters, and face to face meetings.  Leaving my undergraduate university with a degree in economics, I was comfortable with numbers and comfortable enough with the machines/software I used to crunch them.  Still, I was anything but a “techie” and to this day, I maintain that I could barely spell I.T.    My strength was in understanding causality, processes and the culture of different functional groups and the organization as a whole.  I was a skilled learner, able to share my knowledge with stakeholders at every level of the organization.  I imagine this is not dissimilar from many of the administrative leaders of school districts.   I walked into my first day as a Business Systems Analyst, responsible for the successful implementation of an Oracle 11i Warehouse/Transportation Management System into a...

Over the last three months, I’ve come to recognize parallels between K12 school technology and triathlon.  You see, I'm writing this at the advent of my training for the June 2012 Philadelphia Olympic Distance Triathlon.     I figure that the majority of this blog’s readers probably aren’t knowledgeable about the bits and “bytes” of technology.  And that’s OK!  In my opinion, school executive leaders don’t need to know all of the “techie” stuff that gets our technologists out of bed every day.  But everyone, school administrators included, has had the experiences of running, riding a bike, and swimming.  That means triathlon can offer us a common language we can share.    It's my hope that this blog can offer a common, albeit unique, language to understand K12 technology.  This blog can help those of us that are unable to speak in binary code with a means to understand the bigger picture of school technology.    I have swum far, I have ridden far, and I have run far.  Schools have computers, technology departments, and a goal for technology integration.    When it comes to swimming, riding a bicycle, and running, these activities are usually done independently from one another.  Triathlon is about putting...