Reach out @garyackermanphd if you are interested in the entire chapter. ABSTRACT Schools have become places filled with digital tools. Despite this fact, school leaders find technology planning to be an area of relative weakness. This chapter describes the experience of four school leaders who adopted an unfamiliar strategy for making technology decisions. The leader participated in a Read More
Category: Technology Planning
#edtech for #edleaders: Facilitating Conditions
While educators who work in technology-rich places and spaces are likely to become more independent and capable to using it, there are aspects of maintaining technology that are beyond the expertise of educators. This is particularly true of those parts of the technology that can be disastrous to other users if they are misconfigured. Also, Read More
Information Technology in Schools: An Emerging Rationale
Since computers entered the educational market in the late 1970’s, there has been debate about their appropriate role in schools. While some advocate for quick adoption of every new emerging tool, others advocate for avoiding digital technology altogether. Between those extremes we find the more rationale observers who advocate for purposeful and thoughtful approaches to Read More
My Extended Elevator Pitch on Managing #edtech
Managing school ICT must be a very collaborative effort. Many individuals are involved with steering management decisions and these individuals are charged with the greatest vision, yet the least authority. Other individuals are charged with making decisions related to legal issues and financial decision-making, and other still are involved with building and maintain the ICT Read More
My Elevator Pitch on Well-Managed Technology
In general, we can conclude that technology is being well managed when it allows users to be more productive than they would be otherwise. Because management includes financial planning, however, well-managed technology balances productivity and expectations with cost, so it does not exceed the capacity of the organizations to fund efforts. Good management requires effective Read More
Another View of Technology Acceptance
School and technology leaders spend great amounts of time trying to figure out what they should prioritize; this guides their decisions about where resources are used and which efforts receive attention. Despite their insistence that they are data-driven, many school leaders seem to ignore much that we know about how the phenomena they are trying Read More
Perception is Reality with IT
Designing and deploying information technology systems is a perfectly tame (although complicated) process. The rules for configuring systems are well-known and predictable; knowing how we want to configure them can be more challenging, but the process is well-known. Also, the rules for configuring IT systems are the same regardless of the nature of the work Read More
On Teachers, Leaders, and Technology
In locations where computers, laptops, the Internet, handhelds, and related devices have penetrated into the consumer market, ICT has become a transparent part of life making it difficult to perceive its strong sociocultural influences. From inside one of those cultures, we hardly recognize the extent to which ICT changes how businesses buy and sell, performers Read More
#edtech for #edleaders: Cloud Computing
“Cloud computing” is the vernacular term for computing services that are provided via a World Wide Web interface. As mobile devices have become more popular, cloud computing has become popular as well. Despite the impressive computing capacity that is available in mobile devices, they have less capacity than a laptop or desktop computer with a Read More
Ensuring Ease of Use of #edtech
The selection of technology can be a wicked problem for a community. The devices or software available are likely to have some features that are needed but are underdeveloped in the available tools, while other features that are less important will be highly developed. As a result, a poor technology selection can leave some important Read More