When will we see increased student access?

In late November I had a request from a teacher to consider a post about questions I had asked in a blog post last year. He also had many other questions, but ended with this question.

I guess I actually have a lot of questions about where we are going with tech and would love to hear some thoughts on what may be happening to allow kids more access in the classroom? I guess this last question is really the one I am most interested in.

I have waited this long to respond for many reasons with the primary one being the need for our Technology Summit to review, understand, and implement a decision making model that has undergone many revisions over the last year. This model places teachers from the Summit together with technology staff and technology coaches on teams to plan for and implement new initiatives. We now have that model in place on two initiatives that directly speak to the above question.

First, however, I believe it is important to share some of the earlier decisions that we made that have not been as visible to teachers and students and the reason for those decisions. One of those is the decision to prioritize work on the back end to build the infrastructure necessary to effectively and efficiently increase student and teacher access. We had a consultant audit our system and have used the recommendations from that audit to plan and implement changes designed to increase the capacity and health of the system. These are changes that are invisible to most of us, but are critical to our ability to increase the number of users as well as taking advantage of the multitude of Web 2.0 uses.

We also made the decision to provide all of our buildings with wireless access, another necessary part of the infrastructure for increasing student access. Again, it did not significantly increase the number of students online, but without it our options would be much more limited. At the time we did this we were not aware of any other local districts that have this availability in all their buildings.

We also made the decision that major hardware purchases will be aligned with Classroom 10 curriculum development. As new units are developed and/or purchased the necessary hardware and software for implementing the curriculum will be purchased. We did this knowing that there is a set of knowledge and skills embedded in technological fluency and information literacy that all students must have opportunity to learn. Our guidance for this comes from the student NETS and the state's Educational Technology Standards that were recently unveiled.

We believe that we have established a solid foundation for growth and that the refined decision making model is bringing together the right voices to make future decisions. I briefly observed an example of this process today when a team of two teachers from the Technology Summit, two tech staff, and two coaches were making decisions on piloting the smaller, less expensive notebooks that are now on the market. The pilot will be this spring where a new ninth grade social studies unit will be implemented that requires students to have considerable online access. The team identified three models for the pilot. This is very exciting as the cost of these smaller machines, if they prove effective, are about half of the cost of the machines we have been purchasing for student use. More machines for less money is one way of increasing the number of students online at school at the same time.

A second way to increase access is by allowing students to use their personal devices. We have a second team, with the same number of staff and constituencies represented, exploring this issue. We can find no one in our state that is currently allowing this access by all students so once again we have no road map to follow. This team is working with the directive to revise board policy to make this possible. This is a significant change and undertaking for any school system, yet we are committed to exploring and finding ways for this possibility to increase access.

These are two examples of our current efforts to increase student access. I believe that we have positioned ourselves to successfully increase student access over time as well as the scope of what students and teachers will be able to do once online. I am also excited about the decision making model that required much perseverance over time and is an example of leadership demonstrating flexibility and adapting to new and changing circumstances. Please consider asking your Technology Summit representative for further information and updates on the initiatives currently underway.