CDE, NSBA Recognize Ed-Tech Innovators at Inaugural Awards

A new awards competition honored three school districts this month for making technology easier for students, teachers and administrators to embrace. Called the Innovative Technology Integration Awards, the competition was co-founded by the National School Boards Association (NSBA) and the Center for Digital Education (CDE), according to a recent news release, and awarded small, medium and large districts for game-changing ideas in inventory management, professional development and AI leadership.

Washoe County School District (WCSD) in Reno, Nev., won the award for school districts with more than 60,000 students; Henrico County Public Schools (HCPS) in Richmond, Va., was the winner for school districts with 10,000 to 60,000 students; and Peninsula School District (PSD) in Gig Harbor, Wash., won the award for districts with up to 10,000 students.
Experts from CDE and NSBA served as judges for the competition, which invited school systems across the country to submit details about how technology has been integrated throughout their K-12 districts.

LAPTOP FUNDING AND MANAGEMENT

WCSD’s submission outlined how Chief Information Officer Chris Turner and his team took over the funding, purchase, distribution, tracking and renewal of student and teacher laptops in the district of about 63,000 students and more than 100 schools.

“What that did was it served a couple of purposes,” Turner said. “We can leverage economies of scale if we buy 10,000 laptops at a time, and then we can also manage how they’re processed and asset tagged and all the pieces that go into it.”

He added that, by taking on these tasks, his office was able to free school principals from the burden of shopping for laptops — and finding the money to pay for them. Turner said he worked with district financial staff to secure capital funds to pay for the computers.

“Our principals no longer have to try and find the money for laptops and scrape from their own operating budgets or raise money with their parent organizations,” Turner said.

With sustainable tech funding and a districtwide asset database now in place, Turner said the goal is to renew 20 percent of student and teacher technology every year, “so that every five years we’re starting over again.”

ALL HANDS ON TECH

Judges recognized HCPS for establishing, at every one of its 74 schools, an on-site innovative learning coach whose sole job is to help teachers use technology, according to Kourtney Bostain, the district’s director of innovation.

“They’re directly responsible for supporting the teachers with that job-embedded professional learning to best leverage the technology in our schools,” Bostain said.

Each middle and high school in HCPS also has its own on-site technology support technician (TST), according to Brian Maddox, the district’s director of technology, and about a dozen TSTs support the system’s 46 elementary schools.

“It’s really helpful to have that person supporting everything from devices to network to copiers to cybersecurity to digital resources to logins, all the things,” Maddox said.

This framework for supporting schools in their use of technology has evolved over decades, he said, starting around 2001, when HCPS first became a 1:1 district with one device for every student. Today, each of the school system’s 50,000-plus students has a device they can use in class and also take home, Maddox added.

To help students and teachers make best use of this technology, HCPS offers its schools a “digital resource menu,” Bostain said, with a selection of staff-requested ed-tech programs that have been vetted for student safety and standards compliance.

APPROACHABLE AI

PSD Chief Information Officer Kris Hagel was an early adopter of artificial intelligence (AI) for education. He helped a group of district teachers take a six-week course on it in spring 2022, and about nine months later, when ChatGPT was released, he formed a group of educators called the AI Action Research Team.

The group dug into the emerging technology, researching its potential benefits and drawbacks, and began to give presentations about it to other teachers and staff. By the end of 2024, Hagel said they had compiled a whole collection of AI resources for educators.

Wanting to find a way to make this information readily available to staff in his own district and beyond, Hagel developed a website called “Empowering Education with AI: Resources and Guidance.” Here, he posted what his team had created and acquired about AI for education, along with stories from PSD teachers and staff about how they use the technology in their own daily work.

“It’s a constantly growing resource of things that people at our district have done, or research we’ve found, or tools we’ve embraced or found to be useful,” Hagel said. "And then all of our policies and guidance that we offer to our staff is all public there as well.”

All content on the site is listed under a Creative Commons license, he added, which means it can be copied and adapted for use by other districts as well.