Critical DiscoveriesMaintenance Enterprise architecture (EA) must be intentionally maintained. A few years ago, my district's administrative team and technology staff worked together to create a technology plan. Teachers and principals knew who to contact for support, what tools were available, how to access technology professional development, and that we were working toward one-to-one devices. Systems were in place to inform the district's leadership team through a technology pilot group, a technology committee, and resource teachers who worked directly with classroom teachers and their students. However, this has dissolved under a new administrative team. In some areas, the district's technology use has outgrown the old systems. For example, devices and learning tool subscription purchases are underutilized because the teachers are no longer receiving technology professional development. In order for EA to succeed, it must be valued by district leadership.
Systems EA provides systems that lead to cohesion. EA frameworks help district leaders to shape and articulate how districts, and systems within the districts, function. While creating frameworks, leaders must document what services are being offered, who is responsible for services, the relationships between services, and how services support district goals. This framework can also serve as a guide to help prevent counterproductive decisions from being made. For example, due to my district's underdeveloped EA, students are provided with one-to-one Chromebooks and Google Apps for Education, but the instructional coaches lead professional development encouraging the use of paper composition books as a learning tool. Without EA, districts, like mine, deliver contradictory services to students and teachers. Future PlanningStrong EA helps districts to plan for future growth and requirements. By using tools, such as technology bricks, districts are able to plan ahead to strengthen current practices. This also helps leaders and staff to focus on current and future standards. Additionally, EA can help district leaders to systematically prepare for future goals and requirements from outside agencies, such as Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium Testing and the Future-Ready Schools Initiative. By looking ahead, technology leaders are able to plan and implement small steps that will help the district gradually prepare for the desired future state. Educational Technology LeaderAs a result of this course, I am now able to recognize that many of the frustrations district teachers and leaders face can be prevented and solved by stronger EA. On a very immediate level, this motivates me to strengthen the architecture of my own classroom. It ha also helped me to realize that I want to work for a district with strong EA or at least a district whose existing EA supports educational technology. When I am in a district leadership position, I hope to participate in districtwide EA development and/or governance. I also hope to develop smaller EA frameworks aligned with my site and position in order to effectively communicate with my team and plan ahead for growth that will best support students.
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To return to one of my favorite comparisons, computer labs are becoming obsolete. Likewise, technology is no longer an accessory to education. Instead, technology is integrated into teaching, learning, and school business. This applies to the practice of districts maintaining separate education plans and technology plans. Technology plans complement education plans and education plans are supported by technology plans. It is illogical and impractical to craft and maintain two separate plans--or to to expect students to walk to a computer lab to access the internet during lessons. Instead, districts should aim to craft thorough enterprise architecture plans that address how technology can be used and maximized to support teaching and learning.
The practice of creating a National Institute of Health (NIH) brick supported my belief that having clearly outlined goals and plans lead to success. In my own life, I document short- and long-term goals in many areas of my life, such as teaching, health, and finances. The brick model reminded me of this system. I understand how creating a brick can help a district's technology leadership team to clearly articulate the current state and desired future state. By doing this, the team members are able to begin to let go of standards headed to retirement and instead focus on baseline and emerging standards. Also, this will free attention to be directed toward strategic and tactical standards. I am developing a deeper awareness of how best practices in psychology and sociology support education.
As I read the SBAC Device Requirements and Approved Browsers, I noticed that they will present a challenge for many schools. The requirements clearly prevent iPads from being used on the test. IPads do not have 9.5-inch diagonal screens. Additionally, in order to meet the keyboard and pointing device requirement, these items will need to be purchased or districts will need to purchase and share Chromebooks, laptops or desktops. However, this still will not suffice because students who have been issued one-to-one touchscreen iPads are not will most likely not be familiar with a pointing device. Also, headphones will also need to be purchased and distributed, which creates another expense. Examining the SBAC Technology Requirements, helps me to understand the importance of including a needs-analysis and future-planning before making device purchases.
My district recently purchased licenses for Illuminate Education, which is an assessment application. District leadership hopes that Illuminate will become a district-wide gradebook as we transition to standards-based grading. This will eventually replace the use of our SIS, PROMIS, as our report card tool. However, teachers currently use Google Apps for Education (GAFE) and Haiku Learning as our learning management system. With these two tools, teachers are able to create assignments in Haiku that are directly tied to a standards-based gradebook and students are able to assignments work by attaching documents from Google Drive. If the district adopts Illuminate as a district-wide gradebook, this feature will be lost because Illuminate is not GAFE compatible. As a result, students will need to download and upload documents to submit assessments and/or learning will become less transparent to guardians/partner agencies. In order to see challenges such as this district leaders need to step back and examine all major applications in order to better understand how they work--or do not--work together. This approach allows leaders to take a preventative and proactive approach before the licenses are purchased and time has to be spent reacting to unforeseen challenges.
In order to support the students they serve, school districts are responsible for supporting students, teachers, and the entire organization. To efficiently meet these needs, districts divide labor among departments and employee responsibilities. Within the past few decades, technology has led the creation of applications to support these departments. However, some of these applications remain departmentalized, even though current technology--such as single sign-on authentication--has the ability to help transfer information between these systems in a way that can significantly enhance teaching and learning. By evaluating, selecting, and encouraging the development of these types interoperable and common use applications districts harness application architecture to positively disrupt more than just our classrooms.
Source Arizona Education Learning and Accountability System (AELAS) Business Case http://www.azed.gov/aelas/files/2013/10/aelas-business-case-v1.5.pdf Currently, my district does not have a list of approved websites or applications to be used by students. Additionally, to my knowledge, my district has not yet responded to California’s Student Online Personal Information Protection Act (SOPIPA). Teachers are permitted and encouraged to use online educational services, including those to which the district has subscribed and free online tools. As a result, a well-meaning teacher could ask her students to register to use a non-SOPIPA compliant online learning tool to complete a learning task. The information provided when creating student profiles could be used for non-educational purposes, including being made publicly available to potential predators or sold to marketing companies. This could lead to an unsafe situation for one of our students or a potential lawsuit for the district. Sharing these threats with my district's leadership team would encourage them to proactively respond to SOPIPA. To guide their response, I would advise them to follow the following steps:
An essential skill American students to expected to master under Common Core State Standards is the ability to use text-based evidence to support claims. Educators--especially educational leaders--also need to develop this skill. Technology increases educational leaders' access to evidence which comes in the form of data and research. Data and research (which includes data) can be used to help educational leaders make informed decisions across a range of settings. For example, data is used to:
In the same way students are expected to check the validity of sources of textual evidence, it is important that leaders, across all of these settings, understand the sources of the data they use. Data from a biased source--such as a vendor or racist stakeholder group--can be manipulated to persuade leaders to support a decision which may not equitably benefit student groups. Additionally, it is essential that educational leaders remain mindful of the actual data sources--the students. Strong leaders make decisions on behalf of the students they serve by analyzing data in context. Last Friday, I participated in a #GoogleEI Twitter chat hosted by Google for Education. During the chat, Google Certified Innovators shared visions for our organizations and then named challenges that stood between us and our visions coming to fruition. Many participants shared vision of increasing technology use by students and teachers and cited funding and administrative support as challenges. Current and future business architecture can help these leaders and others implement their visions.
In California, schools receive funding based on the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) which enables educators, parents, and community members to create a Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP) which includes school goals, strategies to be taken to achieve the goals, and funding allocation to support the goals. This eliminated the previous practice of categorical funding of educational technology. Since funding is no longer set aside for technology, it can be easier for the LCFF funds to be spent in other areas--especially in districts with weak technology business architecture. According to the Education Enterprise Architecture Guidebook, “Documentation of Business Architecture provides a valuable tool for illustrating and communicating the business of the agency to all stakeholders” (2014). This tool is especially important for education technology leaders to consider because many stakeholders--including some educators and administrators--do not yet understand the role and value of technology in our schools. A well-crafted enterprise architecture plan would be able to clearly articulate how technology can be used to support many, or all, of a district’s LCAP goals. Presenting a business architecture plan to LCAP decision-makers would empower them to recognize the importance of allocating LCFF funds to support technology. In conclusion, in order to successfully implement visions of increasing technology in California schools, educators should use business architecture to clearly communicate their ideas with the educators, parents, and community members who control LCFF funds. Education Enterprise Architecture Guidebook. (2014, March). Retrieved February 7, 2016, from http://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/implementation-support-unit/tech-assist/education-architecture-guidebook.pdf I often struggle to help other educators understand court and community school’s relationship with the county office. Five years ago, it was a little simpler because court and community schools, my district, functioned more independently from the county office. However after restructuring that occurred during a district change in leadership and the county office’s strategic planning process, many services have been reassigned to the county office and the relationship between the two has become increasingly challenging to articulate.
Now, many of the district’s business services are mostly provided by the county office. In some cases, a large percentage of service elements become additional responsibilities of district staff members, oftentimes with little support from above (administrators) or below (staff). This sometimes leads to confusion and weak implementation. For example, the district relies on one instructional coach/digital learning innovator (teacher) to meet all of the district’s educational technology needs without a technology administrator or a team of informational technology staff and/or teachers on special assignment. Most instructional technology services are provided by the county. This keeps the devices, including 1:1 Chromebooks, running, but teachers and adminstrators are not working toward a stated vision.Technology like many of the services offered by the district/coounty function with weak business architecture which decreases the overall effectiveness of the services. Additionally, navigating and utilizing services become challenging without intentional business architecture. Many of the inputs of the services provided by the district/county office are missing, hard to find, and/or unclear. Many simple inputs, such as flow charts, are missing. Without these, it is challenging for teachers to access and drawn upon services offered. Instead, many forms and procedures are sent out in piecemeal emails as text and attachments. According to Education Enterprise Architecture Guidebook, “Architecture encompasses the what, who, how, when and why of the agency’s business and describes the agency’s strategic business intent (its vision, mission, goals and strategies) and how the core functions, processes, information and assets enact the strategic business intent” (2014). Without well planned and informative inputs, the employees are often confused and left unable to access many of the services offered by the district and or county office. This negatively impacts overall district progress toward achieving should teach at business and tent because the services become an underutilized. By examining my district/county office I understand that weak business architecture is the cause of many frustrations the staff experience and--more importantly--a cause of disconnect between the many services and the students they intend to serve. I can easily identify how putting simple business architecture systems into place has the potential to dramatically strengthen my district. Education Enterprise Architecture Guidebook. (2014, March). Retrieved February 7, 2016, from http://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/implementation-support-unit/tech-assist/education-architecture-guidebook.pdf |
@npriesterA collection of my learning from SDSU EDL 680 Information Technology Architecture Archives
April 2016
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