Overview

This chapter addresses the assessment of documented strategies that direct the acquisition, use, maintenance, and expansion of technology in the educational enterprise. These strategies are expressed in policies or as a school or district's technology plan. The overall goal of technology policies and plans is the successful integration of technology to support student learning and school management.

In content terms, technology planning and policies should address three major areas: vision, access, and integration. Vision pertains to what is expected from the technology overall. Access refers to the acquisition, deployment, and availability of technology to the target audiences. Integration of technology is the development and implementation of strategies that make technology useful and capable of accomplishing the vision. More detailed content lists are given in what follows.

In terms of process, policies represent relative end states that begin with the adoption of a technology plan. This in turn involves a series of steps, ranging from the determination of needs, the involvement of stakeholders, and the ratification of a document, to the implementation, evaluation, and revision of the plan.

Assessing plans and policies involves evaluating the content of plans and documenting the existence of policies, as well as assessing the process of plan development and implementation.

The key questions in this section, and the indicators that point to their answers, will be useful to the persons who most likely already know (or can easily find out) their answers: the school or district technology coordinator, or (in larger districts) the Chief Information Officer (CIO) or administrator functioning in the CIO role. They will also provide reporting information to these persons' superiors: superintendents and school board members. That the person closest to the information might find it useful to respond to these questions might seem paradoxical, but the purpose of responding to these questions is precisely to record the state of technology planning and implementation for the local education agency (LEA). Thus, answering these questions provides a snapshot in time, a point of reference and reporting from which comparisons can be made.

Defining Technology Plans and Policies

Policies are guidelines for activity, put into writing and officially decreed or accepted by the organization. In a sense, technology plans represent end points for which technology policies are a beginning and a road map.

There is perhaps no better definition of a technology plan than that described by the Regional Technology Education Consortia's (RTEC) Technology Plan Task Force: "A technology plan serves as a bridge between traditional established standards and classroom practice. It articulates, organizes, and integrates the content and processes of education in a particular discipline with appropriate technologies. It facilitates multiple levels of policy and curriculum decision-making, especially in school districts, schools, and educational organizations that allow for supportive resource allocations." (See Resources for reference.)

As RTEC also points out, planning in general is a continuous, organizational process that provides "a road map." A plan for technology can maximize the potential of technological innovations while helping to overcome the challenges of implementation. Ultimately, it should result in more efficient expenditures and improved student achievement.

Questions about planning and policies interact with the content of all of the other chapters in this handbook. For example, security policies lead to firewall applications choices, covered in Chapter 4, Technology Applications; hardware aging leads to replacement policies, covered in Chapter 5, Maintenance and Support, as well as in Chapter 3, Equipment and Infrastructure. Issues of financial resources for technology are covered in Chapter 2, Finance, and so forth.