Doug Johnson

Improving Administrative Technology Skills
TECH LEADERSHIP, School Administrator, May 2005

Technology is dominated by two types of people — those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand. - Anonymous

A classic Dilbert cartoon shows a technician explaining to the pointy-haired boss how he must turn his laptop computer upside down and shake it to reboot. The final panel has one tech asking another, “I wonder if he’ll ever realize we gave him an ‘Etch-a-Sketch?’” My guess is that more than one school administrator has found similar “pointy-haired boss” cartoons secretly taped to his or her door. I know I have.

As technology plays an ever more mission-critical role in schools, technology literacy for district, building and program administrators is becoming mission critical as well.

The National Education Technology Plan, released in January 2005 <www.nationaledtechplan.org> has as its first action step to “strengthen leadership” if schools are to use technology effectively. The plan states:

“For public education to benefit from the rapidly evolving development of information and communication technology, leaders at every level–school, district, and state–must not only supervise, but provide informed, creative, and ultimately transformative leadership for systemic change.”

and recommends investment in “leadership development programs to develop a new generation of tech-savvy leaders at every level.”

Well, halleluiah and it’s about time.  In the April 1999 issue of School Administrator, Eric Bartleson and I expressed the need for written competencies and technology training for school leaders in the article “Technology  Literacy for Administrators” and suggested a list of skill rubrics by which administrators could judge their competency levels and to serve as a guide for individualized personal staff development efforts. (An updated and expanded list can be found at: <http://www.doug-johnson.com/dougwri/rubric-for-administrative-technology-use.html> and in The Indispensable Teacher’s Guide to Computer Skills, 2nd ed. Linworth, 2002.)

On a national level, the Technology Standards for School Administrators (TSSA) were adopted by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) in 2002 and have become de facto national standards. Part of TSSA are the “Educational Technology Standards and Performance Indicators for Administrators,” six strands under the headings LEADERSHIP AND VISION; LEARNING AND TEACHING; PRODUCTIVITY AND PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE; SUPPORT, MANAGEMENT, AND OPERATIONS; ASSESSMENT AND EVALUATION; and SOCIAL, LEGAL, AND ETHICAL ISSUES.  ISTE’s CNETS website <cnets.iste.org/administrators> contains a wealth of information about support for these standards.

In our district, all school leaders are finding the ability to use technology of genuine benefit in helping them meet their responsibilities including:

• Helping create a shared vision and philosophy of technology use by leading district and site-based technology teams in planning and budgeting efforts. These plans are finally using programmatic needs as the driver for technology adoption.
• Communicating regularly and effectively to staff, parents and community using e-mail, listservs, and websites, including those that allow parents to monitor their children’s academic progress online. School board reports are now illustrated with graphs and photos embedded in multimedia presentations.
• Creating and controlling budgets using real-time finance and accounting computer programs.
• Selecting and evaluating personnel based in part on their technological proficiency.
• Using data mining software to measure continuous progress plans, evaluate program effectiveness, and identify student populations to which additional attention and resources must be given.
• Managing the day-to-day operations of the school such as scheduling, attendance, health records, discipline incidents, and grades through sophisticated student information systems, portions of which are now made portable through synchronization with personal digital assistants (PDAs).
• Creating and enforcing rules and policies regarding school use of technology.

While I would like to describe my district’s formal program for developing administrators’ technology proficiencies, I’ll admit training here occurs primarily as needs arise. The old “just-in-case” technology boot camp in-services have proven to be inefficient and ineffective for both teachers and administrators, and a “just-in-time” model has replaced it. As the genuine need and desire by school leaders to learn how to use specific equipment or programs arises, our department provides individual or small group training.

On an on-going basis, your technology department should be involving administrators in all technology staff development activities and providing technical support. Your district technologists and librarians can help you build your technology leadership capacity by providing clear teacher and student information literacy and technology competencies, advising building leadership and staff development teams, and communicating trends, models, and research about educational technology use.

Both the expectations of and stresses on educational leaders are greater today than they have ever been and are increasing each year. Being accountable for student achievement, attracting and keeping top-flight teachers, and working with dwindling budgets challenge all of us. But instead of looking at technology as just another problem to be added to the list of those we already face, we must harness its power and use it as a powerful ally. By purposely and continuously improving our administrative technology skills, we can lead with technology, not be led by it.

You just might need to find some new cartoons for your door.