Creating a technology team: A mistake not to make
Creating a tech planning team demands ownership of many individuals. A strong team today starts with including faculty across the divisions into the planning team in the first place. Just as we develop horizontal and vertical curriculum teams in various disciplines, the technology team needs to hear from all the stakeholders as well.
Old school technology teams have centered around the administrators and techies making the plan and having the educators carry out the plan. How 90’s! No ownership, no empowerment, no follow through.
So what will happen if the plan is presented in front of a division without any teacher involvement, other than the lone tech person — well, most people won’t speak up because we all know there really are no action plans other than a piece of document and no penalty for not following through. So, the answer from staff will be “Yes, great plan, let’s go for it” and then it’s back to business as usual. One year later and people will begin to ask, “Huh, really, there’s a plan?”
It’s time to avoid mistakes we made in the 90’s. Empower your educators, get your early adopters and risk-takers involved, move the technology mountain.
So what do you think? How would you best develop a technology team?
May 21st, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Dave, your points are well stated. So many committees put together at schools include admin, teachers and parents. Sometimes even students join the team. It is strange to think of a technology committee without teachers, librarians and at least one parent. And in today’s world where students know more about technology than the adults, a student should also participate in the planning as they are the end user.
It is important that technology infrastructure is there to support learning and communication on the education side of running a school. Schools must come up with best practices in how we teach and build community before looking at tech planning.
Thus, I would say that the Technology Committee should really be the Learning Committee where the team works with the curriculum and student learning outcomes to list all the different instructional and assessment strategies needed to reach the student learning outcomes. The action plans then come into play to work through the curriculum design process to integrate the practices that the Learning Committee came up with. Many of the practices will involve the use of technology as well as Information & Communication Literacy skills.
The next step is to then see how technology infrastructure should be designed to support all the learning. I guess this begs the question: How can a technology committee do any planning if they are not connected to what is happening in the classroom?
June 22nd, 2009 at 5:19 pm
Good post! I plan to move into this stuff after I’m done with school, as most of it is time consuming. It’s a great post to reference back to. My blog needs more time to gain in popularity anyway.