Technology Planning Tips

From Ed Tech Review: 10 Steps to Successful Education Technology Plan

Here are 10 steps to create a successful educational technology plan:

Develop a modern educational vision: You should imbibe the 21st century characteristics to learning by making it modern, mobile, collaborative, connected, blended and digital.

Invest in infrastructure: Invest sufficiently to make sure that your school’s physical facilities support your learning program. Infrastructural support is highly needed to teach successfully with technology. 

Save on classroom projection technologies: Try to replace SmartBoards with affordable and equally effective alternatives such as interactive projectors and HDTVs. These alternatives serve the same purpose and cut down the costs of the very expensive SmartBoards.

Decide on the student technology model: Plan the technology access model for your students. You can either set up computer labs for students which have limited access, are shared, school financed and maintained; provide them with laptops that provide anytime dedicated access, are school purchased or parent financed and are maintained and controlled by the school; or implement the BYOD (Bring-Your-Own-Device) approach which guarantees anytime dedicated access, the devices are parent financed, require no maintenance and are inexpensive, they require limited control, are web-oriented and are suitable for middle and high schools.

Create a virtual learning environment: Encourage online and blended learning.

Emphasize on training and professional development: Try to spend a little less on equipment and more on professional development and training of your teachers and students. 

Minimize investments in servers, storage and software: These three components have deprecating value, require battery and data backup, physical and software security, repair and downtime, network consultants, upgrades and start-over replacement. Cloud computing can reduce hardware, software and IT costs dramatically and add significant functionality. So, consider using cloud-based apps such as iCloud, Dropbox, Google Apps, etc.

Replace Textbooks: Replace them with eBooks which are interactive, include multimedia, include testing and formative assessment and have features for social reading.

Be flexible: What seems to you a technological miracle today, may lose its value tomorrow. You should be flexible enough to replace and upgrade your current technology, as it keep son evolving.

Utilize government subsidies: Some government fund programs offer discounts on selected services to qualifying schools, libraries and other welfare organizations. Always keep yourself aware of such programs to utilize what they offer to support the development of your school.

Technology Plan Template