Assignment #1: Work in groups with Intel's Visual Ranking Tool to consider these essential conditions in your school districts.
Assignment #2: After
you have read the essential conditions and have used the Visual Ranking
Tool, reflect on the conditions present in your own school district
and/or teaching situation.
In my school district, the essential conditions have primarily focused on getting “buy-in” from everyone in order to move ahead with any technology integration plan. During my ten years in-district, too often funds were spent on a piece of technology or service because someone thought it was “cool” but would move ahead without consulting with or even talking with the personal who would do the actual implementation. Now our district is trying to correct this error using a District Tech Team that has teacher representation from each school building. In addition, each proposal now includes plans on how we will fund the technology, how will support for successful integration be provided, and how will we know when we have succeeded. This is still a new process and we are still working to get everyone on board to this different approach.
One area that we are still lacking in is Supportive External Contexts. It is only with the recent hardships with trying to maintain current funding levels, let alone funding for future growth, that has pushed the administration to seek out ways that we can build stronger support from the community. The plan is twofold: improve communication with the community while also showing them that we are doing this at a cost savings to the community. For example, we have reduced the amount of paper and ink used to print off notices in favor of an Altert-Now automatic email system, a Twitter feed that is available by both our website and by following, and just recently an Apple TV setup in the main lobby to showcase what students are doing each day within and outside of the classrooms. We have not had these systems in place long enough to assess whether these investments have paid off or not, but administrators remain hopeful (as do we in the IT department).
One area that we are still lacking in is Supportive External Contexts. It is only with the recent hardships with trying to maintain current funding levels, let alone funding for future growth, that has pushed the administration to seek out ways that we can build stronger support from the community. The plan is twofold: improve communication with the community while also showing them that we are doing this at a cost savings to the community. For example, we have reduced the amount of paper and ink used to print off notices in favor of an Altert-Now automatic email system, a Twitter feed that is available by both our website and by following, and just recently an Apple TV setup in the main lobby to showcase what students are doing each day within and outside of the classrooms. We have not had these systems in place long enough to assess whether these investments have paid off or not, but administrators remain hopeful (as do we in the IT department).
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