Category: Technology Planning

For decades, those responsible for organizing and presenting in-service professional development for educators have used a variety of models for providing learning experiences for teachers, and these have been designed to support all aspects of TPCK and to accommodate the needs of individual learners. These activities tended to reflect training in other professional organizations (especially Read More

An information technology network is much like other technologies as the expertise needed to design and build it is much more specialized and expensive to than the expertise needed to manage and operate it once it exists. Consider how an IT system in a school is similar to an automobile. Planning and building each requires Read More

A relatively new specialist to join the IT staff is the data specialist. The need for this specialist arises from both the skills necessary to manage the databases in which demographic, health, behavioral, academic, and other information that is housed regarding students and the increasing demand for data-driven practices. Schools store vast amounts of data Read More

“Beta-testing” is a term that is kicked around in the vernacular and in the popular culture, but it is actually a part of the system design and deployment work of IT professionals that is taken very seriously by the most successful IT designers. Beta-testing refers to the stage in design when the system is first Read More

Technicians are the individuals who have one of the most important roles in IT system operations in schools as they are the face of the IT department to most members of the organization. A technician is likely to spend his or her day troubleshooting and repairing end users’ devices such as PC’s, laptops, printers, and Read More

Once computer networks are installed and configured (usually in consultation with external engineers and technicians), system administrators employed by the school ensure they remain operational and functional. These professionals listen for network problems by both attending to reports of malfunctions from users and by monitoring system logs, and they both resolve problems that are identified Read More

While computer rooms have largely fallen out of favor, they continue to be maintained in many schools. As more diverse computing devices have entered the educational market and Internet-only notebooks became more popular, computer rooms have become more important for providing capacity for specialized purposes that require sophisticated software that must be installed on devices Read More

The computer technologies introduced to schools in the last quarter of the 20th century were part of a long parade of electronic information technologies that were introduced first into the popular culture and then into education throughout the 20th century. In 1986, Larry Cuban, a professor of education at Stanford University, reviewed the history of Read More