Those who take an active role in their school are often told they should stay in their lane.
They may be serving on a committee charge with making certain recommendations
and upstream out of that specific area by necessity.
Of course we should expect this because schools are modular,
so when they are divided into different lanes,
those lanes are still deeply connected so that what happens in one can affect what happens in another.
This can be frustrating for individuals who are dedicating time to making recommendations.
Committee members often reason,
if you're not going to take my advice, then why am I giving it?
Sure, that's true and it's especially true when we're making technology decisions in schools.
Well as I see it, there are three things that must be true about computers and the networks that we have in schools.
It's probably true in other fields as well, but I'm most familiar with what happens in schools.
So these are the three characteristics of a well-designed IT system in any school.
Okay, first, technology must be appropriately designed.
Second, it must be properly configured.
And third, it must be reasonably implemented.
So appropriate design refers to the technology that's available to students and teachers in their classrooms
and in other instructional spaces and how they use it.
It must be designed to meet their pedagogical goals, their educational purposes must be met by the technology.
I started my career just as desktop computers were arriving in classrooms
and then I switched from teaching science and math to being an educational technologist,
largely to help my colleagues figure out how to use these strange and devices in their teaching.
In the decades since, they've largely figured that out.
Well, yeah, I guess they are figuring it out, but they're probably halfway there.
Appropriate design does come from educators.
You know, that comprises teachers and department heads, instructional coaches, curriculum leaders.
They all know what they need to teach.
They know the students, they know what they can do, they know what the curriculum expectations are,
and they're exploring teaching strategies to accomplish all those goals.
When we think about the technology that's installed in classrooms, we must trust educators to guide us.
Their guidance will ensure that the technology is appropriately designed to meet their needs.
The IT we find in schools today is sophisticated, I mean very sophisticated, in business and IT fields
we call these enterprise systems, and it takes skilled professionals whose full-time job it is
to manage the hardware and the software to ensure that it remains functional.
The proper configuration also requires multiple types of IT professionals.
There's not one person who's going to be able to do all of this.
We device technicians to fix malfunctioning or broken devices.
We need network administrators to manage users and other resources,
and to configure the routers and switches and access points,
and all this other hidden network infrastructure that's behind the walls and in the ceilings of our schools
to make sure we keep those little green lights indicated we're connected, green.
We also need data specialists to manage our databases and help generate the reports that we need.
Yeah, when I started, a tech savvy teacher could keep a small fleet of devices running in their spare time,
but you can't do that anymore.
Sure, schools like all organizations have limitations.
The most obvious limitation, of course, is money.
Teachers might want certain technology and the IT professionals might be happy to build it,
but if it's going to break the bank, so to speak, then we just can't do it.
Yeah, schools generally have leadership teams comprising individuals who are responsible for such decisions.
First, it's the nature of the students.
In business, we assume IT users can read and write in that they have a clear purpose for using digital tools,
but these assumptions are not always true in schools.
Teachers are the ones who observe students using technology.
They know students' struggles and their patterns of use,
and they can tell when the computers are easy for students to use and when they're effective as learning tools.
Second, the nature of the curriculum.
Most have a similar concept of teaching.
We think of a teacher standing in front of a classroom talking to students and telling them what they need to know.
From an IT perspective, it's really easy to build those systems.
The reality is digital tools are used for far more complex educational purposes and more dynamic purposes,
and the teachers have the expertise to make the judgments about what technology meets their needs.
Consider the IT and the Science Lab.
Those teachers know the tools that their students need in order to learn science.
They know the tools needed to teach science, and they know that better than anybody else can.
Those decisions are going to incorporate both the tools that are used throughout the field
and the specific tools that the local community of science educators want.
Third, the local realities are very important as well.
Educators can plan all they want.
IT leaders can meet the requirements of the teachers,
but until that technology and the curriculum and the teachers and the students all come together,
then the details of how those plans will be realized can really not be known.
Appropriate design, therefore, is an iterative process.
We make a guess as to how things will work, then we upgrade our plans and change them as we learn more and as we go.
When I talk about proper configuration of IT, I'm referring to how the hardware and software is set up to be robust and reliable and secure.
The devices that we buy and install, the software we install, the configuration settings,
especially on the network, and how we manage users' access to the resources all affect how properly configured it is.
Robust technology means that it's available when we need it.
That includes making sure we have a sufficient number of devices.
They have the necessary capacity to run the software that we need.
They connect to networks with sufficient bandwidth so that latency doesn't interfere with learning.
Reliability refers to the fact that the IT functions as expected.
Obviously, this means that devices are operational, but it also means that necessary software has been licensed.
The wireless connections are available and there are other configurations that allow for seamless connection to networks and seamless operation of the computers.
All IT professionals concerned with security, that's number one on our to-do list for managing any network.
But security takes on special importance in schools because we're dealing with data about young people or about our students.
So we must ensure that that data is accessed only by those who are authorized to see it.
It really isn't the configuration that makes the server secure when it's installed in a manufacturing shop, for example,
it's the same configuration that will make it secure in a school.
Ultimately, the reasonable implementation is going to be decided by the chief executive officer of the school,
you know, be it a superintendent, president, whatever, but they get lots of advice.
Financial professionals in the school can determine if the decisions fall within the available budget,
and they may be the most obvious criterion for reasonableness.
Schools also have to follow policies and regulations to ensure that their actions are legal,
and school leaders have legal advisers to ensure that their decisions meet those expectations.
Yeah, it seems it makes some decisions about reasonableness.
Either we have the money, we don't.
We have the personal resources or we don't. The decisions either comply with the legal and regulatory expectations or they don't.
Other decisions, however, can be much more contentious.
It's not unusual for educators' decisions about appropriate design and IT's decisions about proper configuration to be in conflict with each other.
Let's consider complex passwords.
For example, IT wants to ensure users have complex passwords to keep the systems and the data that's on them secure,
but complex passwords may be too complex for young students to remember or to type.
I've actually seen students who are unable to use computers because they were unable to log on because of the complex password requirements.
Ideally, these conflicts are going to be resolved through some kind of collaboration.
You know, usually we start with the definition of system requirements.
Teachers are going to tell IT what they need.
IT is going to build it in the way that they see fit.
What we find, though, is that teachers are not always clear about what they want or IT isn't good about hearing it,
or they all ignore the factor that they didn't recognize as being important until a system was actually in use with the students.
So the result is that what they originally built is not satisfactory.
As a result, they need to go back and design it again.
That's why this is an iterative process.
Yeah, you're right, but sometimes we discover that it is appropriately designed,
but either IT did not explain its operation to teachers or teachers didn't follow those directions.
If IT doesn't make sure that folks know how to use a system or if users don't use it in the way that it's been configured to be used,
then neither complain about the other.
It really depends.
For anything in IT to work and be secure, then it must be properly configured.
But IT needs to listen to the advice of educators,
and they must keep changing the configuration to accommodate the needs of teachers and students.
It ends up being a bit of a moving target, but that's the nature of the work.
Usually school administrators can keep out of these decisions unless there's an unresolved conflict,
and they can always tell because teachers are complaining and they're complaining a lot.
Then the school leaders have to try to figure out whose turn it is to be right as it were.
If teachers are using IT as they're supposed to, but it doesn't do what they needed to do,
then it's reasonable for school leaders to direct the IT professionals to change the configuration.
If the configuration has been changed, but teachers aren't using it the way it was designed,
then it's reasonable for school leaders to direct educators to give it a try and see just how appropriate it is or isn't.
Sure, I like to say we don't want our educators running our IT, but we don't want our IT folks running our schools either.
They have much different types of expertise, and they make some very different types of decisions,
and they need a very different skill set.
They need to stay in their lanes and only recommend within their area of expertise,
but we need them to communicate and to keep communicating so that the other group understands their rationale.
If we do this, then the IT in our schools as well, it's appropriate and proper and reasonable.