Technology As A Journey, Not a Destination

Here are some handy tips for those schools that do not have dedicated staff.

“Don’t:”

1. Trust salespeople.  About anything.  Ever.  If you remember none of these rules, write this one down and never forget it.
2. Buy a complete, all in one, web 2.0, interactive, fully intuitive, interactive learning and blah, blah blah from a company promising it for your web solution.  You can have a web site up and running for around $20 a month that will look professional and just about anyone can do it.
3. Buy hosted e-mail.  Google Apps for Education is Free.  7+GB of mail, hundreds of users.  Plus you get access to all of the other amazing features of Google Apps, too.
4. Care about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – see Rule 1.  You can help your search engine rankings in ways that won’t cost anything.

“Do”

1. Consider Google Apps for Education
2. Hire a “techie” for questions.  Even if it’s only a couple of hours, you will make much better decisions if you have some knowledge of what those salespeople are trying to sell. (See Rule #1 above)
3. Consider Free/Open Source Software
4. Create social media sites for your school – Facebook and Twitter.  They are a fantastic (and free) way to communicate with your community and students.
5. Look at what other schools are doing.  You can learn a lot from others in your similar situation.  Many times, someone else has already made the mistakes that you are considering making.

It’s always exciting to be at the beginning of something new.  Our school district is embarking on many new areas, some exciting and some scary.  Whether it’s the technical side of implementing programs, or the being a part of the logistics of making sure it all works out, I just love new activity.  As I’ve said before, I’m not a teacher by trade, so the whole academics side of things is a new process for me.  However you look at it, though, change is unnerving for many people, regardless of their background.

On the one hand, you honor successes of the past and build on them.  On the other hand, you have to take a critical look at the past performance and be willing to face inadequacies and shortcomings in order to make the corrections.  It’s sometimes easy with technology to get caught up in the “if we just bought this” or “if only we had money for that” game that sometimes you can let it consume your strategy.  If that happens, instead of focusing on correcting the things you can, you get stuck in a defeatist attitude.  Even with what we have, it can always be better.

As I look at the many shortcomings of our technology infrastructure, I see that we have all of the makings of something great.  I was thinking a lot about it today in particular, since it was one of those days when everything seemed to be just itching for conflict.  I’ve been running this game of trying to tweak things just right, make adjustments here, and little corrections there.  I know others on my team have been doing the same thing.

Today it became even more clear that sometimes you just need to have a fresh start.  It really solidified my decision to make my task over the course of the next few months to take a look at the services, functions that we need and focus on making them work.  At some time – summer or a break – we’re going to shake the etch-a-sketch and just start drawing again.

Crazy, I know.  However, we’re reaching that critical point where the tweaking is taking as much time as a rebuild.  We’ve got workarounds for our workarounds when a simple redesign would solve the problem.  I think part of it is battling several years of patches and duct tape solutions that just build and build and then become entrenched ways of business.

Rather than spend energy focusing on workarounds, I want to spend energy building something great.