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FETC25: How to Craft Sustainable, Flexible Technology Plans

Expert panelists at the Future of Education Technology Conference in Orlando said K-12 technology plans should be adaptable, living documents informed by large committees and tailored to specific goals and mandates.

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ESSER is over. E-rate is in doubt. The future of the U.S. Department of Education is unclear. For all the fiscal turmoil of pandemic expenses and changing presidential administrations in recent years, some educators think long-term planning for technology in K-12 is only going to get harder. Amid so much uncertainty, panelists at the Future of Education Technology Conference in Orlando this month said the trick is to craft technology plans with the assumption of change built into them.

Leading a two-hour session on best practices for technology plans, Donna Williamson, the retired CTO of Mountain Brook Schools in Alabama, said essential duties of those documents include identifying what needs to occur, identifying all data sources and offering an action plan. For this she recommended three sections: one for apps, one for user devices, and one for classroom technologies. Finally, she said, tech plans should include a section on budgetary requirements, both funded and unfunded.

Another speaker and former CTO, Sheryl Abshire of Calcasieu Parish Public Schools in Louisiana, recalled a time when a technology plan was a document to be printed and somewhat set in stone. Now, she said, it should be a work in progress that is continuously adapted.

“Today, the power of a tech plan is that it’s evolving. It is not static,” she said. “It’s a living document that continues to evolve based on a ton of issues — funding, policy, politics, legacy planning.”

POLICY AND EQUITY


Abshire said the time when schools could “just experiment” is past. She stressed that school leaders must make comprehensive decisions based on mandates, strict budget requirements and other external and internal factors. For example, she said a ruling last year by the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that threatens the future of E-rate, a program that covers broadband expenses for schools and libraries, has made long-term technology plans more difficult.

“We’re going to see what the Supreme Court says, and if they say it is [unconstitutional], then [the Federal Communications Commission] is going to go back and try to figure out how they’re going to fund it. I have a sneaking suspicion it won’t be to the amount of billions we’re getting now. Just pay attention, because an email to your senator, your representative in Congress, makes a difference,” she said. “If [E-rate] funding goes south on us, you’re going to be counting on some more local funding, and you’re going to be counting on some parents to step up and help the school. We used to do gumbo cookoffs, and we made some money when I was a school principal. So we may go back to selling gumbo and doing whatever we need to do, but you need to be aware of that, and certainly the concept around equity.”

Abshire referred to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Education Technology Plan update in 2024 as a call to action, citing three aspects of the digital divide that need addressing: digital use, digital design and digital access. She said a sustainable technology plan should be equitable and inclusive to the extent that it shrinks those three divides, should serve as a guide for IT leaders and teams, should be useful for budgeting purposes, and, when implemented, should have an impact on student learning.

A CONSISTENT VISION


Speaking as a director of technology for Mountain Brook Schools, Suzan Brandt advised attendees to make sure the stated goals in their tech plans align with their district’s vision, mission and values. Williamson concurred, adding that the tech department should craft a “vision statement” to be used as a branding tool. She said if the department has a tagline that effectively says “this is who we are and what we aspire to be,” when funding needs arise, IT leaders can point to that statement and ask: “How can we be this without the resources?” She also recommended using generative AI to save time drafting some of the language and creating tables.

Brandt said a tech plan should also establish standards or norms for equipment, services, bandwidth and other areas that IT supports. She said this involves defining what all classrooms should have, what students will have, and what instructional staff will have year-round. To do this, she recommended dividing the plan into sections to make it manageable: classroom technologies, 1-to-1 devices, infrastructure, safety and security, applications (vetting, configuration, deployment, data governance/privacy), administration and operations, and professional development.

Williamson added that it’s better not to be overly specific in describing these norms.

“I would strongly suggest to you that you are a little bit broad, in that, we don’t say ‘100 percent of classrooms will have a flat interactive panel.’ We say ‘display device.’ The reason is because that gives us the flexibility of having either/or,” she said. “The other thing is, if you are a secondary math class in our district … there’s a good chance that you’re not going to just have one display device.”

IT STARTS WITH LEADERSHIP


Since a technology plan should be a living document that looks several years ahead, Williamson said, her team did not have to write a new one every year but would merely revisit it during budgeting, talking to every department head about what changes they’d like to see.

Abshire said the creation of a technology plan requires a committee, and hers included an elementary principal, a middle school principal, various department heads, a chief financial officer, two teachers from elementary, middle and high schools, someone from federal programs and a curriculum facilitator, among others.

“It was a huge committee, and we broke off into groups and worked,” she said. “But having a principal chair your tech-planning committee is the best advice I could give you, because they are linked to the practice in the schools, and everything you do is supporting schools and students and teachers. I’ll tell you, when the high school principal presented the tech plan to the board — I was there, we were there — but it made all the difference in the world.”
Andrew Westrope is managing editor of the Center for Digital Education. Before that, he was a staff writer for Government Technology, and previously was a reporter and editor at community newspapers. He has a bachelor’s degree in physiology from Michigan State University and lives in Northern California.