Introduction
This was a fairly easy activity for me to accomplish since I was promoted this year to Educational Technology Specialist and am now intimately involved in the school’s technology planning. While I am proud of some of the strides we have made this year, an examination of the ITSE technology standards makes it clear that we still have a long way to go. As an independent school, we’re free to chose our own path in this regard but a tendency to work on too short a timeline leads us to jump from project to project in a haphazard fashion.
Assessment
In the actual meaning of the term, no formal technlogy plan exists at the school. There is quite a bit of enthusaism and support for the integration of technology into our classrooms and we can often identify funding for exciting, visible projects, but they don’t really integrate into any long-term technology plan, though some effort is made to justify things after-the-fact.
I meet regularly with two other people, the school’s Operations Manager and IT Manager, to discuss technology issues, but these meetings are primarily concerned with the management of problems and only rarely with moving forward. This internship activity forced me to confront these issues and, though the conclusions are uncomfortable, this has been a worthwhile and important reflection and learning process.
Case Study I
I am going to use a single issue as a case study to outline the challenges our technology planning process faces.
Over two years ago, the IT Manager identified a shortcoming in the school’s IT infrastructure and recommended the school make a change to its data-storage, user-authentication and school-wide email solutions. Research was coducted and Google Apps were identified as the most promising solution. Over the two years since, very little progress has been made; the actual contracts have been negotiated and signed, but as of the start of the current academic year, nothing was implemented.
We ran into two major conflicts at the start of the school year: staff training and branding/marketing. Regarding training, I am amazed at the number of people who work with a computer every day and really don’t understand much about how they work. I have visited schools with effective technology training for their faculty and I’m jealous of their programs; it’s a long-term goal of ours to bring our entire faculty and staff more up-to-speed. But, in terms of our Google Apps rollout, simply helping people understand issues like why they should not use personal email accounts for school communication has been a significant challenge.
Our second conflict is with our marketing department’s plan to change our school’s name sometime in the next 6-18 months. This change will affect our domain name decisions and, as such, is preventing us from moving ahead with the infrastructure-change. It’s caused some unanticipated problems across the board and is a prime example of how we tend to jump first and look later… and how that causes real problems.
Case Study II
Another piece of technology we’ve implemented recently has shown more promise and success. At the start of the current school year, we rolled out an addition to our school website that creates a back-end site into which parents, teachers and students can log in to access private content. This content includes gradebook information, pages for each class, online learning tools and communucation portals that have significantly affected our entire community.
Here also, we could have done a much better job in planning, training and communicating, but even with our haphazard approach, we’ve seen real progress and success. Some teachers have taken the ball and run with ith, implementing online learning and assessment that we can point to as examples of where we would like the entire school to head… but others resist the changes and still more are confused or frightened by them.
We scheduled a series of open-door training sessions for parents that drew no comers; it was a frustrating exercise that showed us that most people are either already engaged with us technologically or are not… and are not interested in being engaged until they encounter a problem. Finding a way to help those parents become more proactive and involved has been a real challenge.
Reflection
All in all, these two projects have opened my eyes to how far we have to go in terms of our Tecnnology Planning, but I am encouraged by how far we have come. The freedom our independent status gives us means that we can experiment in ways a more restricted school can’t and we can offer more options for our parents, students and staff. It’s an exciting prospect.