Episode 22. This isn't your parents' educational technology.
For generations, the fundamental purpose of schools has been to give students
experience using the dominant information technology and data sources in the society.
When the dominant type of data was printed and scripted on paper, education took a very
familiar format. Reading, writing, performing calculations on paper, and drawing on paper
became the fundamental skills practice as one progressed through their education.
In the middle of the 20th century, electronic digital computers were invented,
and by the 1960s, advocates were promoting their use in schools. By the 1980s, desktop
computers were common in classrooms, and in the decades since, high-speed internet connections,
wireless networks, and one-to-one computing had become ubiquitous in schools. This reflects a
reality of society at large as well. White-collar work, much blue-collar work, and popular culture
are dominated by digital data and electronic digital computing. While there are many reasons why school
leaders and educators should be concerned with the amount of access to digital devices their
students have, there is general agreement that educators should use these tools in their teaching.
School operation also depends on digital information and IT tools. In addition to keeping the organization
operational, for example buying supplies, paying bills, and managing human resource functions,
schools collect, manage, secure, and report data about the students they enroll.
When a school is open and classes are underway, there are likely to be thousands of devices
powered on and accessing both local area network resources and sharing a common connection to the
internet. These connections are essential to our work and to our teaching. The magnitude of the
problem of providing all digital devices on campus with fast, secure, and reliable connections is
considerable. When I started in education, tech-savvy teachers could reasonably manage one or two
devices in each classroom in their spare time. I know because I did. Today we have enterprise
IT systems installed in our schools. When I started, we spent our technology budgets primarily on
devices that put devices in users' hands. Today the budget spent on devices users never see or
touch, things like switches, routers, servers, access points, and other network devices, and the
software needed to keep these devices operational consumes a large part of the IT budget. Keeping
the enterprise IT systems operational requires staff that were not necessary when I started.
Technicians, system administrators, data specialists, and webmasters are all employed by schools.
Those individuals, along with the chief information officer, are responsible for those systems and
their use. They oversee the installation, manage the operation, advocate for the support, and plan
for the improvement of IT systems in our schools.