Blog Post 2: Funding for Educational Technology

Funding in today’s educational system is tough.  There’s no way around that.  While listening to the podcast, that was reinforced.  The other important takeaway for me was that finding ways to creatively fund technology for education is an important skill for any administrator, technology director/coach, and even classroom teachers.  Lynn Wietecha makes great points that as many schools used to use money from their general funds to help purchase technology, that simply is not available anymore.  When it comes down to funding a computer lab versus a teacher, it is not hard to understand why many districts choose the latter.  

However, I think there are creative ways to seek funding.  Wietecha mentions that sometimes to seek, earn and maintain grants, you need someone who is at least at a part-time position.  I would agree with this statement.  As a former technology coach who was employed for ¾ of the day, I had time to seek additional funding for purchases that could not be covered by technology bonds like applications.  After this position was reduced and the new technology coach’s job demands increased, though, this was a difficult thing to do.  Now, seeking grants or creative funding falls to our classroom teachers who do not always have enough time to seek out funding opportunities.  

One of the biggest ideas I took from Wietecha was the idea that sometimes implementing technology can help to save funding elsewhere.  Her printing example is one that resonates in my district.  Our former elementary school principal said that printing in that building was cut in half because some of the practice of the basics such as letters, numbers, addition and subtraction could now be done with the iPad.  This is not to say that handwriting is not important (especially at the elementary level), but there were times when students could complete a similar task on the iPad.  I can see this as being true at the secondary level as well where students can submit work via Google Drive, rather than printing a paper or teachers can share handouts through applications like iTunes U, Edmodo or Google Drive again saving multiple pages from being printed and potentially lost and printed again.

While listening to the podcast, I had one major question: how many K-12 schools are moving to BYOD?  I can see the benefit in regards to financial savings.  There’s no question in the sustainability of BYOD.  However, I still struggle to understand how they can be easily managed at a K-12 level both from a safety standpoint, but also from an applications standpoint.  I worry about the ease of implementation from a teacher’s perspective who struggles with technology when there are multiple devices in the room that may or may not have similar applications.  

The last thing that I took away from this podcast (and perhaps the most important) is the importance of demonstrating that the technology being implemented was effective in supporting and improving student learning.  Using programs that help to track student growth, like Wietecha mentions are important, but I also think it is important to show the other ways students are growing as a resulting of implementing technology into the classroom.  Our district has done a “Technology Night” that helps to showcase how we integrate technology and what students can do with it, but also to teach members of our community about their devices.  Student growth as a result of technology integration can be shown in many ways and we need to show our community and parents those results.