| Innovations In Education Book Series (Microsoft Word) |  |
| The Innovations in Education book series is published by the Office of Innovation and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education. The books detail how school systems around the country have put the No Child Left Behind Act to work. |  |
| Finding Funds For Student Laptops | |
| An article describing different approaches to funding one to one laptop initiatives | |
| 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 | |
| Acceptable Use Policies | |
| Description of why you must have an acceptable use policy and what it should have | |
| Using Technology To Raise The Achievement Of All Students | |
| The goal of this initiative is increased achievement and success for all students through the unlimited and effective use of accessible technologies. | |
| Affording 1:1 | |
| Two articles that provide strategies and guidelines for funding a successful one to one initiative. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| Consumer Guide To Buying Assistive And Learning Technologies | |
| This decision support tool assists users in becoming an informed consumer of assistive and learning technologies. The tool provides information on many topics, along with helpful questions to ask vendors. | |
| The CoSN Accessible Tech4All Initiative | |
| The goal of this initiative is increased achievement and success for all students through the unlimited and effective use of accessible technologies. | |
| Critical Issue: Enhancing System Change And Academic Success Through Assistive Technologies For K12 Students With Special Needs | |
| In this Critical Issue, we draw from successful assistive technology initiatives in Wisconsin and Schaumburg School District 54, Illinois, to frame our focus on key elements of effective systemic change to improve schools. | |
| Around The World With Technology | |
| Since the onset of the internet, teachers and students have found strong learning outcomes from having students engage cross-classroom, cross-community collaboration. This article profiles two of the organization that lead the way in using technology to provide this opportunities for teachers and students to learn. The international Education and Resource Network (www. iEARN.org), provides a high quality set of cross-classroom projects that have been designed by students and teachers working on human needs, and environmental issues. The Global Schoolnet Foundation (www.gsn.org) also includes a project registry and sponsors the International Cyberfair contest each year that inspires thousands of students to engage in service learning partnerships in their local community. The students bring their technology skills to help community efforts provide a range of social services. | |
| Crossroads In Education | |
| This is a comprehensive article on the use of social tools. The resource includes information on infrastructure requirements as well as academic implications. | |
| Cutting The Cord (PDF) | |
| This article discusses how we move into the future without encumbering tremendous costs and which technologies are worth adopting even if they do involve new investment through wireless technology for districts | |
| Developing Effective Technology Plans | |
| An article describing ways to be strategic about technology planning, funding, and implementation. | |
| Elementary School: Part One (PDF) | |
| Mobile technologies are becoming ever more sophisticated, with expanded computing power and connectivity with external devices, which increases their usefulness in schools. These technologies can help make learning science more meaningful, authentic, productive, and motivating for students and teachers. Strategic integration of mobile and classroom technologies can enhance learning across the curriculum. | |
| Students Want More Use Of Gaming Technology | |
| Project Tomorrow's fifth annual Speak Up Survey, the largest annual survey addressing the attitudes and opinions of K-12 students, teachers, parents, and school administrators toward the use of technology in education, reveals that online or electronic gaming is one of the technologies that students use most frequently -- and that educational gaming is one of the emerging technologies that students would most like to see implemented in their schools. Yet, only one in 10 teachers has adopted gaming as an instructional tool. | |
| Home: Part Four (PDF) | |
| The Internet and telecommunications networks can be an important part of a community's communications system for both routine information and especially emergency information. Through applications like automated telephone messages, text messaging, e-mail, and websites, schools can alert community members about a wide range of topics from routine changes in scheduling and reminders for upcoming events to dismissal, lockdown, evacuation, or other information critical in an emergency. | |
| Home: Part Three (PDF) | |
| New global positioning technologies are offering unprecedented learning and support opportunities. Global positioning systems (GPS) are being used to help provide directions for cars and buses but can also be used in an emergency to locate vehicles or individuals. Systems can keep track of bus locations, monitor the bus systems, and keep real-time records of school bus stops. Cell phones with GPS access can be used to collect geopositioning data to log artifacts or geocode pictures to provide students with a real-world context for what they are learning. | |
| How To Buy A Student Information System | |
| Imagine you are planning and implementing a new student information system (SIS) for your school district. This scenario is exactly that faced by Maryland's Prince George's County Public Schools. Prince George's County CIO Wesley Watts was charged with defining technical requirements, selecting a vendor, and implementing an SIS that meets the district's current and anticipated future needs. This is his story. | |
| High School: Part One (PDF) | |
| Mobile technologies and new information distribution models make it possible to provide on-demand multimedia learning opportunities. Innovations such as podcasts enable the creation of audio or video lessons that can be stored on the web and delivered to computers, iPods, and other handheld devices. Podcasts can be as short or as long as necessary to convey the topic at hand, and because they can be played on mobile devices means that they can be used for "just-in-time" learning, in addition to supporting formal instruction. | |
| High School: Part Two (PDF) | |
| The use of technology can be particularly effective in of special education. Adaptive and assistive technologies give students with physical or learning challenges to access to learning opportunities. In addition, administrative systems allow teachers to automate the creation, monitoring, and updating of individualized education plans (IEPs), streamlining the administrative processes and allowing teachers to spend more time developing learning experiences and working with students | |
| High School Library: Part Three (PDF) | |
| Increasingly, the Internet can be a critical research tool. In addition to accessing publicly available websites, libraries often pay for subscriptions to private databases of copyrighted material such as newspapers, magazines, and journals that are not freely available. The combination of free and for-fee online services along with traditional books, periodicals, and other primary source materials helps provide students with a wide range of sources and perspectives that not only give students familiarity with different types of writing, but also can improve the quality of their research. | |
| iCommons iCurriculum | |
| A wiki which aims to build a movement of open education practitioners working together to build new global initiatives | |
| Internet2 (PDF) | |
| The majority of U.S. states now offer K-12 schools access to the new, high-capacity network via a partnership with the colleges and universities that started it. What is Internet2 and how can schools benefit from the connectivity being offered? | |
| K12 TCO Calculator | |
| The Total Cost of Owernership Calculator can be use to help estimate the mulityear cost of implementing and maintaining technology systems in a K-12 school. It helps leaders understand how technology planning can be integrated into the annual budget, training, data gathering and assesssing school performance. | |
| Middle School: Part Five (PDF) | |
| The use of technology can bring experiences into the classroom that would otherwise be unavailable, impossible, or at the very least difficult to accomplish. Simulations are a dynamic visual resource for introducing and teaching complex concepts. Depending on the medium, they can be sourced, saved, and rerun at any point in the learning process. Simulations can allow students to test their hypotheses, validate or invalidate assumptions, and run multiple what if scenarios that might otherwise be too costly, too difficult, or too dangerous to undertake in reality. While simulations are most often associated with sciences, they can be an engaging and effective way to teach complex concepts in many other disciplines as well. Also, giving students the opportunity to combine technology experiences with hands-on activities helps demonstrate the value of the technology for design and planning and the limitations of simulations relative to real-world development. Finally, giving students the chance to present their work to an audience of other students, parents, or community members can elevate the level of their work. | |
| Maximizing The Impact (PDF) | |
| In a new report, Maximizing the Impact: "The Pivotal Role of Technology in a 21st Century Education System", the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA), the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills urged renewed emphasis on technology in education. | |
| From TCO To TVO (PDF) | |
| In the business world, there is a temptation to judge value by only examining profit and loss. However, such attempts do not take into account the multiple facets of any technical solution to a business challenge -- for example, failure to set the proper goals for the technology intervention or judging the value based on inflated expectations. Similarly, educators often fall into the trap of trying to draw a direct causal link between IT and student achievement, without taking into account such variables as teacher skill or preparation, adequacy of technology support, or the unique characteristics of a particular group of students/learners. | |
| 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. | |
| 1:1 Computing | |
| the information in this guidebook can provide administrators with useful advice, practical strategies, and best practices to consider when implementing 1:1 computing. | |
| I've Got A Palm In My Pocket | |
| This article describes the first phase of research on using palm pilots to increase student achievement in an inclusive classroom with 28 sixth grade students, 6 of whom could be considered to have special needs. | |
| Professional Development: A Results-Driven Approach To Teacher Development | |
| As Long Beach Unified puts the finishing touches on its standards-based curriculum, professional development built on rigorous teacher standards is becoming the top priority. "It's really coming down to what is happening in a classroom with 35 kids and one teacher." | |
| Technology Planning | |
| As a result of SEIR*TEC's work at various school sites during the course of a research project period, several valuable tools for helping districts and schools create strategic educational technology plans were gathered. These tools along with some firsthand examples and stories form schools that have used them can be found at this site | |
| Apple Podcasting In Education Video Series | |
| A three part series that explores (1) what podcasting is; (2) how standards can be met with podcasting; and (3) an administrators view on podcasting. | |
| 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. | |
| Public Schools Expand Curriculum Online | |
| Most of the 3,000 students in the Virtual Virginia program enroll in online advanced placement courses. | |
| Safeguarding The Wired Schoolhouse | |
| help school leaders understand the issues involved in managing Internet content. | |
| The Role Of The School Business Manager In Technology Planning (PDF) | |
| An report advocating for the critical role that School Business Managers play in the school or district technology planning process. | |
| Smart Budgeting (PDF) | |
| "We have to get smarter with our technology purchases," says Sally Bair, a district technology facilitator. "We aren’t going to keep seeing those huge increases in funding that we saw in the 1990s." | |
| Smart Budgeting With Total Cost Of Ownership (PDF) | |
| At the advent of the 21st century, schools are devoting more and more financial and staff resources to incorporating technology into the classroom to support teaching, learning and the management of school business. But as schools purchase computers and link them together in local and wide-area networks, totaling the dollars spent on hardware is merely the beginning of the total dollars needed for the effective use of the technology purchases. And it is but one small part of the expenses schools can expect in subsequent years if they are going to effectively use those technology-based resources. | |
| Using Students As Campus Technical Support (PDF) | |
| A brief article detailing the reasons and process of having students help with technology support. | |
| The Power Of Learning And Leadership | |
| The Youth Technology Support Collaborative (YTSC), a group of non-profit organizations, technology companies, and professional associations, created this on-line guide for school decision makers, interested in student technology support programs. It is designed to help decision makers define the type of program best suited to their student and school needs based on the best practices of current practitioners. | |
| K12 Online Learning | |
| This 2007 study is one of the first studies to collect data on and to compare fully online and blended learning in K-12 schools. The goal was to explore the nature of online learning in K-12 schools and to establish base data for more extensive future studies. Issues related to planning, operational difficulties, and online learning providers were also examined. This research should help in thinking about if online learning should be a part of the technology plan. | |
| Synching Up With The iKid | |
| Children today have been surrounded by technology for their entire lives. Smart schools and smart educators realize this and are working to integrate technology that will engage and excite students. | |
| Teachers Tap Video-Sharing In The Classroom | |
| Video in the classroom has evolved since the days when teachers wheeled in film projectors on carts. More teachers are using online video-sharing sites modeled after Google Inc.'s YouTube to engage with students. And video is no longer a one-way channel of communication; students are participating in the creation of videos, too. | |