| Promoting Technology: 13 Ways To Do It (PDF) |  |
| An article listing 13 effective ways to promote technology use and support among educators, students and community members. |  |
| Survey: Schools Fail To Teach Innovation | |
| U.S. teens say they aren't being prepared well for technology, engineering careers | |
| The Communication Plan | |
| This checklist give information on how to develop a communciation plan. It provides tips and guideance for creating a plan and for how to communicate change both internally and to the wider community | |
| At Your Service: An Interview With Miami-Dade's Public School CTO | |
| This is an interview with Debbie Karcher, the CTO of the Miami-Dade County Public School district. She discusses how their district moved from having each school employ an independent tech support employee/staff to a shared model. Now, the district communicates rules, policies, and procedures to all tech staff, who then go out into the schools. There is also a central group of field techs available to help everyone. This model stresses the need for communication and shard information. | |
| Ohio State IT Communication Plan (PDF) | |
| This example of a communication plan outlines the communication needed, stakeholders, communication method, and the responsible party. | |
| Measuring Success (PDF) | |
| It has been over twenty years and billions of dollars spent for educational technology since the first computers were put into schools, and we are hearing increased demands for evidence that these investments have been worthwhile. But "proving" that educational technology is worth the investment is a complex challenge for educators. The good news is that there are now some major research studies pointing to the effectiveness of technology use in schools. | |
| 11-Year-Old Boy Takes School Network By The Horns | |
| When Victory Baptist School, a small private school in Sherwood, Ark., was struggling to keep its computer network together last year, an 11-year-old student named Jon Penn stepped in as network manager. | |
| Best Practices For CTOs (PDF) | |
| In "What It Takes: Essential Skills of the K-12 CTO," published as part of the 2004 CoSN Compendium, CoSN's K-12 CTO Council identified nine skills essential to the job of a school district's Chief Technology Officer. Over the past year, the CTO Council has conducted a series of Leadership Forums at which technology leaders from districts around the country have come together to discuss these essential skills and to talk about the challenges they face and the "best practices" they've discovered in their day-to-day work. | |
| What It Takes: Essential Skills Of The K-12 CTO (PDF) | |
| Discusses what today's district-level technology leader need to know in order to keep up with the challenge of ever-changing technologies and ever-shrinking budgets. | |
| CoSN Case Study: Lovejoy (TX) Independent School District - Suburban, 2195 students (PDF) | |
| In this district, committees are utilized throughout the strategic planning process for professional development, from the identification of needs, goals and targets to teacher and student surveys to development of and scheduling of activities. Using teacher-based committees and groups has been the key to composing successful professional development plans. Necessary technology leader skills that have helped make the district's technology vision a reality include grant writing, professional networking, building partnerships, having strong interpersonal skills, and having the ability to budget and price shop. | |
| A School Decision-Maker's Guide To Student Technology Support Programs (PDF) | |
| The Decision Maker's Guide is not a how-to guide for launching a program. Rather, these pages provide background for decision makers to make a case for such a program and also determine what type of program is most appropriate to pursue. The resources section links to documents and Web sites with specific program development resources. The YTSC white paper: "Youth Technology Support Programs: Meeting the Challenge of Technology Support in Schools," Douglas Levin, American Institutes for Research, February 2004, provides a summary and review of programs and literature. | |
| Partnering For Success: IT And AT Together (PDF) | |
| This article discusses the relationship between general and special education technology that, when used together, can encourage a positive school culture and technology-rich environment. The author includes input from approximately 20 national, state, and district leaders with insight into Instructional Technology (IT) and Assistive Technology (AT) about the benefits and challenges they have faced in trying to forge this relationship. | |
| Technology Cooperation Vital In Specical Education | |
| New software, advanced technology, and computerized devices can help special education students talk to their teachers, write out their thoughts and feelings, and understand a printed page. But schools are finding that many of the high-tech devices can't open those doors for students without direct and ongoing assistance from information-technology specialists. | |
| CoSN Case Study: Troy Area (PA) School District - Rural, 1740 students (PDF) | |
| Teachers and Educational Technicians facilitate technology use in each of six schools where diverse projects occur. The district Technology Coordinator focuses on professional development, budgeting, consultations and providing technical advice. Technology Thursdays allow for staff training in use of or implementation of a specific instructional technology tool, and an intensive two-week professional development "conference" has been developed for summer. Online resources and information support education and training needs. | |
| Roles In Technology Planning | |
| A set of guidelines describing the roles of various stakeholders in the technology planning process. | |
| Building A Committed Team | |
| An article that can give a CTO information on how to build a successful team. It provides goals, action options, and implementation pitfalls. The article provides audio links to interviews with experts, and there are links to short case study examples. | |
| The ePM Book | |
| This resource is an e-book on project management not in education but in the corporate world. The E-PM Book provides a comprehensive look at building teams to organize for programmatic change with the use of technology. One of the central points is the interactions among people are shared by many interlocking forces only one of which is technoogy. The display of informations in many different formats might suggest some new approaches to sharing district share information. | |
| Best Practices Case Studies: Macomb Intermediate School District | |
| This case study talks about a school district which started an inclusion movement, after the need for shared expertise and collaboration across its diverse schools became clear. The article discusses how the district communicated and collaborated to solve instructional challenges. Begin With ME! is a project that includees professional development opportunities, amplifying technological and instructional support and managing pilot projects that renew and improve curriculum and instruction. The project illustrates the value of shared vision, embedded professional development and constant communication. | |
| The Next Step: Managing Your District's Technology Operations | |
| This article discusses technology management - how to ensure successful implementation, adoption, and results from educational technology. The author specifies that technology should be implemented in cross-funcational teams, in order to ensure that all stakeholders have a say in the planning and implementation process. | |