Field Observation Blog Post

I have been conducting my observations at the Hawken School. The technology department is made up of ten adult members as well as a student staff of about 15 currently active students. The three main contacts in the tech office include Ryan Wooley, Chief Technology Officer and Assistant Directors of Technology Rick Bartel and Dave Solema. There is also Rennie Greenfield and John Guinan who are charged with Technology, Library and Media Services. I have spoken with all of the above members about working with technology both in and out of the classroom as well as availability from off campus.

There is a plethora of different technology available to the students at Hawken. All students are provided with a Lenovo Yoga for the duration of their schooling beginning in the seventh grade and prior to those years, students have access to tablets in each classroom. All employees are given a Lenovo Yoga as well. All members of the community (students, faculty, and staff) have access to projectors, sound systems, Adobe programs, Microsoft Office Suite and many other options for programming. There is an entire multi-media center in the building where students have a green screen or white screen and can create original content for projects. Everything created from the lap top can be shared to the cloud (Hawknet) where students and teachers have access to data. There is a lot a 3D printing studio and a Fab Lab where students can build and create using technology. There are projectors in every classroom that students have wireless access to from their school issued lap tops. In the athletics building for human performance classes, students have access to pedometers and heartrate monitors. Their progress is automatically sent to an app on any smart mobile device so they can keep track of their physical well-being. All of these features are at no extra cost to the students or family.

If students are having any issues with their devices, there is a tech office staffed with three adults as well as their student staff at all times. They have loaners available for students if they can’t figure out the problem quickly.

In an interview I conducted with John Guinan, he stated that the technology department (for application level firewalls), can block specific applications to each individual device depending on whom has control of the device. “Rules are created to allow or deny entire application and can even allow a certain application, while blocking individual features of the app. For instance, many schools block such applications such as snapchat or YouTube.” He also admitted that the firewall is pretty easy to get around. Students have figured out that they can connect to their mobile phone’s hotspot in order to get around the firewall that the schools server uses. Hawken also uses VPN or the Tor Browser to help with safety and security for its users. 

A systems admin, or other IT professional is in control of the firewall and its’ settings. All five members of the tech team listed above have been extremely helpful in understanding the technology that is available at Hawken. They are all extremely knowledgeable and willing to talk about how to progress with technology in the classroom setting.