The past few years have been a great learning experience for
me. I’ve gotten to work alongside some
really great and inspirational people. I
have recently moved into the role of technology director about a year ago now and
I’ve really started to see and understand what our roles should be. Tom Murray
in particular has guided and mentored me to become an extremely student focused
IT Director. Much of the IT world is
turning into a cloud based service model.
The knowledge required to run
systems is becoming less and less as these service driven models are being
adopted. How do we stay relevant? I believe Tom Murray actually had a great
article on this topic, however, I can’t seem to locate a link to it. We need to constantly stay on top of Ed Tech and make suggestions
based on research and more importantly student feedback, and avoid the marketing hype. What do our students want and need, not what
we think they should have? I believe
there should be some give and take in that process… They are living in a world
that we only try to understand. They are
growing up when social media is the norm and not something that was new during
their lifetime that they had to learn. I
think many times we deny access to these resources because as we were growing
up that is what was done. It’s a
distraction or it causes problems because of ABC. I would challenge any us to go into a meeting and not open a computer or use your smart phone. You would likely be lost and feel disconnected, so why do we sometimes expect students to? We need to
meet them where they are and not try to make them live in the world of restrictions
we grew up in. Teach them digital
citizenship and empower them with the knowledge to use these “distractions”
properly. The technology of yesterday is
no longer a wow factor to this generation.
We need to discover what it is on an ongoing basis and mold it to our
classrooms to create engaging and collaborative spaces. I feel many of us are so concerned with technology
and systems that we lose sight of our primary goal which is to help kids
achieve greatness. Many times in our
roles as technology directors we are faced with requests and challenges that in
a lot of cases are returned with an immediate “No”. If you are not a technology director, but are
in education, you will surely understand my last statement. We need to not be a roadblock and be student
driven solution specialists. We must
keep security and safety in mind, but ultimately make decisions based on
student outcomes regardless of the amount of legwork that we personally or our
teams put in if we expect to see our students reach their highest
potential. We must work alongside our
curriculum and pupil services departments to have open conversations about
needs and hurdles. We need to envision
the future needs of our kids in a world that is ever changing. We need to meet our kids in their technology
filled worlds. One of my goals is to
solicit more information from our students when making acquisitions or decisions
and let them have a voice. I am working
on forming student technology advisory teams in our middle schools to empower
those students to assist in making decisions for our one to one program that
begins in 9th grade. Who
knows better what device will work best for them, than the students themselves. I plan to add more to this blog in my next
post. Stay tuned…
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