| Banning Student Containers |  |
| An article about the missed oportunities and possible harm schools are doing by banning the very technologies that will prepare students for a global economy. |  |
| Michigan's One to One Experience | |
| An article describing the results of an evaluation of a successful laptop program in Michigan. Lessons learned, professional development, and changes to classroom teaching are discussed. | |
| Educational Research On Interactive Whiteboards (Document Missing) | |
| A collection of abstracts and references from research on the use of interactive whiteboards in teaching and learning. | |
| Data Can Drive Development | |
| An article about the importance of teacher professional development in the areas of data management, data analysis, and discussing data and evidence. | |
| Nine Excellent Reasons For Technology In Education | |
| An article listing nine important reasons to integrate technology into schools. | |
| Elementary School: Part Five (PDF) | |
| Teacher collaboration is a significant contributor to successful technology integration. Through collaboration, teachers support one another as they learn how the software works. But what is perhaps more important, working together provides opportunities to discuss how technology can be applied to the curriculum and how the material should be taught. By working together, teachers strengthen each other and provide more consistent experiences for students. | |
| The Information Edge | |
| Educators at all levels are more interested than ever in tapping the potential of electronic data to accelerate their students' achievement. | |
| An Innovation Odyssey | |
| Looking for ideas to help you use technology to motivate and inspire? See how teachers around the world use technology in their classrooms to support student learning. | |
| Eastern Townships School Board Announces Exciting Positive Results From Laptop Initiative (PDF) | |
| Press release from Canadian School Board showing positive results in its third year of laptop program | |
| Key Technology Trends | |
| An article outlining the current technology trends reported in a 2006 survey conducted by the Greaves Group. | |
| Achieving With Data (PDF) | |
| This report is the second in a three-part research effort to investigate the prevalence of performance-driven practices in urban school districts across the country. The first study, "Anatomy of School System Improvement: Performance-Driven Practices in Urban School Districts," analyzed the state of performance-driven practices within 28 leading school districts. This second year of research has been conducted with the support of the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and in partnership with the Center on Educational Governance at the University of Southern California. The study captures the details of data-driven instructional decision making at the classroom, school, and system levels in two urban school districts and two nonprofit charter management organizations. In doing so, the researchers document effective performance-driven practices, identify salient themes regarding the structure and culture of the systems, examine needs for improvement, and make recommendations for policy and practice. | |
| Data Use: Data Primer | |
| The Data Primer is an instructional website designed to help educators become more comfortable with thinking about and using data for the purposes of instructional decision making. It has an overview and four modules. Each of the modules contain a tutorial, practice and extension section. The path of inquiry followed in each "Tutorial" section is applicable to all types of educational data. It works for all types and levels of testing and assessment. It can be used for analyzing attendance information, surveys of attitudes and perceptions, and programs. The questions apply equally well when analyzing data at the district, school, grade, classroom, or student level. | |
| Policy Brief: Is A Laptop Initiative In Your Future? (PDF) | |
| A report that discusses the results of several evaluations of one to one initiatives. The report details the benefits of one to one initiatives and outlines key components to success. | |
| No Child Left Behind Issue Brief (PDF) | |
| A report on the impacts effects of NCLB, which focuses on how several exemplary districts are using data-driven decision making for improving school and student achievement. | |
| Nurturing The IT Culture (PDF) | |
| An article describing the importance of establishing, communicating, and evaluation a technology vision when leading a technology initiative. Steps for creating and implementing a vision are outlined. | |
| The New Literacy | |
| An article that defines a new kind of literacy, which goes beyond decoding text and includes information, technological, and mathematical literacy. | |
| Technology In K12 Education (PDF) | |
| A white paper that asserts that how technology is used is more important than if it is used in schools, and that we must transform our thinking about education in order to realize the potential of technology in education. | |
| Technology Standards For School Administrators (PDF) | |
| A report that defines technology standards for school administrators. The standards define the specifics of what administrators need to know and be able to do to lead the effective use of technology in schools. | |
| Technology Evaluation Essential Questions (PDF) | |
| A worksheet that facilitates the answering of some essential questions of technology evaluation. | |
| High School Classroom: Part One (PDF) | |
| The ongoing assessment of student progress can provide a foundation for personalized instructional delivery. Technology tools can rapidly generate feedback from a variety of assessment types. Using technology-based diagnostic assessments, students and teachers can understand what a student already knows and help plan an instructional program to get him or her to the next level. Frequent formative assessments can allow students and teachers to monitor student progress and understand how close they are to their goals. Summative assessments allow students to demonstrate mastery and teachers to document student achievement. Technology-based assessments can also adapt to student understanding, becoming progressively more difficult as students learn more. | |
| Middle School: Part One (PDF) | |
| Assessment is critical in teaching and learning. Embedded assessments provide teachers with evidence of student progress and areas where a student is struggling. Assessments give students clarity about their own success and weakness. Assessment information can inform educators, parents, and community members in evaluating the effectiveness of a program. The challenge with assessment has always been the lag time between taking the assessment and receiving the results. Online assessments can greatly reduce this turnaround time, meaning that students and teachers alike have near real-time access to information about student learning. | |
| Redefining Data-Driven Decision Making | |
| An article that introduces 12 districts' approach to integrating IT staff into a comprehensive plan for improving school performance. | |
| Ten Tips For School Based Technology | |
| An article detailing 10 avoidable mistakes (and their solutions) that one technology director made in his first decade of technology planning and integration in a K-8 school. | |
| Of Hubs, Bridges, And Networks | |
| This article suggest that leaders seeking change should abandon the idea that human organizations function as hierarchies -- and work at understanding the way social networks shape learning in schools. It provides a number of suggestions of ideas that can be used to provide for continuous professional development around the introduction of new technology. | |
| Are Teachers Ready For 21st Century Learning? | |
| An unprecedented level of discussion about 21st Century learning and its impact on teachers' work has taken place in the Teacher Leaders Network discussion group recently. Among the many topics covered: Internet safety and cyber-bullying; growing up online; the risk of teachers becoming "irrelevant"; the frustrations caused by school firewalls; and the distinction between digital tools and digitally-infused learning. | |
| Report Of The Special Commission On Educational Technology | |
| Massachussetts interested in creating in one-to-one computing for all students, established as set of demonstration sites for one-to-onewireless, portable, full-featured computing programs in various middle schools throughout the state as the initial step in a structured roll-out option. This plan, lays out the rationale implementation plan. An absolutely critical element for success included serious, embedded professional development for teachers and those preparing to become teachers to learn how to integrate technology to transform their teaching strategies. | |
| Conditions For Student Success (PDF) | |
| How can school finance better support student performance? This is the question in front of the National Working Group on Funding Student Success, a group convened by the School Finance Redesign Project at the University of Washington's Center on Reinventing Public Education. The group's purpose is to craft a vision of performance-oriented school finance and what it takes to get there.This paper, written by working group member Joanne Weiss of NewSchools Venture Fund, explores the conditions necessary to remake education as a performance-driven system. It lays out the practices that need to be in place, the solutions and tools that need to be built to make those practices scalable, and the deployment of resources (both financial and human capital) necessary to enable continuous instructional improvement and academic gains for all students. | |
| Promoting Technology Integration School-Wide (PDF) | |
| Learn about research on the diffusion of innovations and its implications for how to facilitate the diffusion of technology use across classrooms in your school. | |
| Using Technology To Improve The Literacy Skills Of Students With Disabilities (PDF) | |
| This document is a summary of best practices in using technology to improve the literacy skills of students receiving special education services. Topics under discussion and review include: common literacy problems experienced by students with disabilities; legal requirements of technology consideration and acquisition in relation to a school district's special education assessment and planning process; leading approaches to assessing students' technological needs; suggestions for incorporating assessment information into the development of individualized education programs (IEPs); and a variety of low- and high-tech tools that can be used to enhance the literacy skills of students with disabilities." | |
| Professional Development: 21st Century Models | |
| An article asserting that the key to achieving quality teaching is to support and retain teachers through quality professional development experiences. | |
| Collaborative Schools (PDF) | |
| A growing number of educators are focusing their efforts on improving the work environment of teaching. In place of the typical school's norms and practices that isolate teachers from one another, some schools are initiating new norms and practices that encourage teachers to cooperate with one another and with administrators on school improvement. The primary goal of these "collaborative schools" is effective teaching and learning; other objectives are that teachers will be accorded respect as professionals and that staff harmony will increase. | |
| Online Professional Development: Get The Facts | |
| This article gives information about online professional development options, benefits, and technical requirements. The article also provides information on how online PD fits into federal and state standards. | |
| Peer Coaches' Spark Technology Integration | |
| For teachers to integrate technology effectively into their instruction, administrators must provide high-quality professional development balanced by continual support. Schools, districts, and states that offer professional development in conjunction with "peer coaching" as a means of providing this support have shown a significant increase in technology integration and, ultimately, student achievement. | |
| Peer Coaching Program | |
| The Peer Coaching Program is designed to train teacher leaders to serve as peer coaches for colleagues. As coaches, these teachers will assist their peers in identifying ways to enhance standards-based instruction and to offer their students engaging, technology-rich, learning activities. In doing so, peer coaches will help their colleagues to develop the necessary technology skills and instructional strategies needed to integrate technology into teaching and learning. | |
| Planning Professional Development | |
| This checklist is a resource within an NSBA education leadership and technology toolkit. It is a checklist of what to consider when planning professional development for staff, such as equipment, money, sources of information, needs of the staff, issues with adult learners, and ongoing support. | |
| Staff Development Tied To Literacy Gains For Students | |
| An audit of professional-development literacy programs in a Florida district has found that students of teachers trained in those programs showed significant gains in reading-test scores. | |
| Using Study Groups To Disseminate Technology Best Practices | |
| In the study group model, a small group of teachers works collaboratively over the course of several weeks, months, or even years to focus on a pedagogical issue of common concern or interest. Because teachers are working with each other, study groups provide opportunities for teachers to learn from each other and to receive collegial support. | |
| Teacher Supervision and Development: An Instructional Module for Edutopia | |
| This module will help school leaders organize their thoughts, experiences, and resources to answer these questions for their own schools. Included are materials to assist school leaders in their own efforts to establish and sustain an environment that supports teacher development and the professional growth of teachers. In today's context, many school leaders find that their faculty includes a large number of beginning teachers and those who have come to teaching from alternative routes. These groups of teachers make the role of the principal as instructional leader especially important. Experienced teachers must also keep abreast of new policies, curriculum, brain-based research, technology, etc. | |
| Middle School: Part Three (PDF) | |
| For teachers to successfully prepare students to be self-directed life-long learners, they must be self-directed life-long learners themselves. Teachers need time to explore the expanding digital landscape, to learn to use new digital tools, and to develop new ways to bring these experiences into their classrooms. If we want our children to become the innovators and inventors of the 21st century, we must allow our teachers to model experimentation and innovation. Time for personal exploration with technology promotes operational proficiency and can inspire creativity, innovation, and invention. | |