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Instructional Technology Leadership

ISTE NETS A Standard 2 Brief

Angela M. Blocher
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Developing a culture within a school takes on many faces with various nuances. Incorporating a

culture to include technology isnt as difficult as it seems because technology has become a part

of societys everyday life. The difficulty with integration often stems from funding, generational

acceptance gaps and an overall misunderstanding of the effective use of technology. In order for

a schools leadership to encourage technology integration, he or she must first set s precedence

of its importance by exemplifying the key indicators of this standard. Those include improving

the learning environment to include current and readily available technology resources,

encouraging the use of technology by modeling and practicing this process and participate or

collaborate with similar entities utilizing the same resources.

At McDonald Elementary School, Georgetown, South Carolina, we are constantly and

consistently maintaining our technological devices. Our teachers, and support staff who qualify,

are on a four year rotation for personal laptops. We have recently contracted to receive one-to-

one Chromebooks for grades third through eighth with a roll-out plan to occur over the next year,

updated promethean boards and interactive projectors and continual professional and technical

support from our technology coach. We are not short of the hardware or devices but we are

deficient with how to properly, effectively and constructively integrate technology.

Although we have the support of our technology coach and additional assistance at times from

our reading coaches, we fall short with our professional training. We maintain the mentality that

those who wish to learn and are interested in full integration, we will serve. If you struggle as

many do due to generational hindrance and are uninterested, then your promethean board is truly

a glorified overhead projector and your desktop computers are utilized to keep the kids busy.

We need to refine our approach and get back to basics. We spend more time with the newest and
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greatest that we forget about the process involved and how technology is an instructional tool

and not just something fun to play with.

Although we have our struggles and areas in need of improvement, we are striving constantly to

improve. We are training and integrating a state department supported program that infuses

STEM and technology, Project LEAD. The program provides training for teachers to transition

their classroom from a traditional learning environment to one that encourages and promotes

inquiry and more student-centered. The program provides a class set of IPads and a teacher

MacBook so students can utilize a variety of web-based tools to collaborate, research, record and

report out their learning. All the lessons are focused on STEM based projects with a focus on

integrating technology, science and reading. We currently have two teacher who are infusing this

program within their content instruction and have seen tremendous growth with student mastery.

We are also fortunate that our administrator demonstrates the importance of technology by

highlighting a technology focus during our monthly faculty meetings, utilize the special tools

within Microsoft Outlook such as reminders for calendar events and school announcements to

our families. Of course we also utilize our school website and we have recently established our

own Facebook page. Teacher evaluations are no longer hand written on carbon copied forms but

completed on a tablet electronically so teachers receive immediate feedback following an

observation.

We have had very little difficulty establishing a culture receptive to technology and as our

generational veterans slowly move into retirement, we will have an incoming class of more

technological savvy teachers. We are gradually increasing our equipment however, my hopes are

we will soon redirect our attention to proper implementation of technology integration. Time will

tell.
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Bibliography

http://www.iste.org/standards/standards

http://www.21things4administrators.net/capstone-2-digital-age-learning-culture.html

https://www.pltw.org/