This activity was tedious at times. I was grateful that, despite my school and district ranking rather low in terms of technological maturity, at least a lot of their data can be found on the Internet. It saved me from having to find people in the summer to answer my millions of questions!
I wasn't surprised by much of what I found. I have been a student and now a teacher in this district for almost my entire life, and I'm pretty familiar with its strengths and weaknesses. My husband also teaches in this district, and has some limited tech responsibilities in his school, so I was able to discuss my findings with him. We agree that there are a lot of caring and highly-qualified teachers in our district who would do just about anything to help their students. But we are definitely behind schedule when it comes to implementation of educational technology. Resources are spread very thin, and the district has never formalized a comprehensive, proactive plan for technology. At best, technology is briefly mentioned in strategic plans and budgets, often in an "exploratory" way, with language such as "analyze support for..." and "analyze need for...". Therefore, we teachers are all scrambling to do what we can in our own classrooms, according to our own means and abilities. There is a lot of variety in what we do (and what we CAN do) but in the end, my school ranked in the "Islands Stage". I hope to someday (soon) look back on this evaluation and think "WOW! We've come a long way!"
Click here for the technological maturity benchmarks survey (spreadsheet format).
Click here for the evaluation summary (the spreadsheet information along with demographics and synthesis).
No comments:
Post a Comment