Issue Oriented
What Is Technology's Role in School Improvement?
By Anita McAnear
What is school improvement? Is it meeting adequate yearly progress as defined by the No Child Left Behind Act? Is it ensuring that all students are prepared for the future? If the epitome of school improvement is meeting the learning needs of all students, then you have to start where students are in their intellectual development. You have to provide individualized learning, and that requires technology integration.
Glen Cove School District fell off the dreaded New York Schools in Need of Regents Review list recently in part by rejecting the one-size-fits-all approach to technology use (see "Extreme Makeover: School Edition," page 12). Just as important, writes Shari Camhi, district officials aligned the technology to the curriculum and made sure it matched student interests.
I hope that all educators are engaged in dis-cussions in their schools and districts about meeting the learning needs of all students. Communication and collaboration are key to those discussions. A robust and reliable technology infrastructure is essential for communication, along with read-write, community-building, and networking tools to aid collaboration among all stakeholders, especially students, who must learn these digital-age skills.
Pioneering students, teachers, schools, and districts have demonstrated the value of tools such as blogs, wikis, Nings, and podcasts, and they have done interesting and promising work with more controversial tools such as microblogging and chat rooms for back-channeling. These Web 2.0 tools have their safety and security challenges, for sure. But it is important to address those challenges without blocking access to these tools in our schools.
ISTE 2010 in Denver, Colorado, will offer assistance in some interesting sessions. Steve Dembo, online community manager from Discovery Education, will tackle the issues from a policy standpoint in his session titled Policies, Safety, and Social Networking. He will discuss how districts have embraced new technologies while maintaining high standards and student safety, and he will explore sample policies used at exemplary schools around the world.
Sarah Rolle, director of technology at the Elisabeth Morrow School, will chair a panel discussion called Unblocking the Web to Unlock Learning.
If you are ready to develop and implement a plan, bring a vertical team from your school
or district and participate in a day-long preconference event titled Leading with Connection: Make and Take a Plan for Today! The TIE Colorado/ISTE Leadership Bootcamp is an event designed to build understanding, facilitate conversations, and develop a framework for change around communication and collaboration practices as described in the ISTE NETS for students, teachers, and administrators.
The ISTE 2010 program will be online starting mid-February at www.iste.org/iste2010. Please share your district or school’s policies, practices, success stories, and challenges by writing an article for L&L or contributing to the discussion on the L&L group page on the ISTE Community Ning (www.iste-community.org/group/landl).
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Anita McAnear is L&L's acquisitions editor and national program chair for ISTE's annual conference and exposition. A former middle school math and language arts teacher, McAnear has been with ISTE since 1983.
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Copyright © 2010, ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education), 1.800.336.5191 (U.S. & Canada) or 1.541.302.3777 (Int'l), iste@iste.org, www.iste.org . All rights reserved.
Learning & Leading with Technology | February 2010
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