Dillon Technology Plan

Dillon School District 3

Latta, SC
 

Introduction/Overview
Organizational Change
Budget & Finance
Professional Development
Technology Infrastructure
Outcomes
Evaluation
Contact Information
 

Introduction/Overview

Since the spring of 2003, Dillon School District 3 has totally reinvented the way that technology is used in the district to improve education. Our involvement with ISTE in their technology institute was a catalyst for major change and has influenced systemic change in our district. This involvement has lead to successful grant applications with our State Department of Education for several years and helped us continue to expand our technology initiatives. Our key leader has been the District Superintendent, Dr. John Kirby, who has created the vision and enthusiasm for our district to proceed with such a massive project. Other key leaders have been the District Curriculum Coordinator, Cindy LeGette, and District Technology Coordinator, Robert McIntyre, who had the task of implementing the project and working through the myriad of details to make it successful. During the ISTE Institute, our core team totally recreated and streamlined our district technology plan. This plan, married to our new vision statement, set the stage for a massive overhaul of how we utilize technology in our district. (Vision statement: To promote student achievement through technology-based classroom instruction and to provide the necessary resources to accomplish this at every school grade level.) Using this vision statement we created two overlying goals that simplified our plan and provided a basis from which to get started. Goal one: Improve instruction to increase student achievement. Goal two: Increase the use of technology by the entire district. Once we had these fundamental pieces in place, we were then able to flesh out details and provide concrete objectives for accomplishing these goals. During the 2 years of our project, this technology plan has proved to be a living document that has changed and improved through our experiences while still retaining our original vision and goals.

During our discussions with district staff, we realized that technology was going to be a key factor in providing our students with the skills and knowledge they needed to compete in the world after high school and compete with students from more affluent areas. Considering the fact that our district will never be able to provide the resources that other districts can, we recognized that technology can be an equalizing factor for us.

Rather than focus on a core area or a particular group, we felt like we could make the most difference by including our entire district and making an enormous commitment to systemic change. We established guidelines based on ISTE NETS and identified what we expected every student to know from grades pre-K–12. In addition, we also established similar guidelines for teachers and staff. Once we had these in place, we then focused on what changes/improvements we could make at each level that would best meet our project goals and help everyone learn the skills they were expected to master at each level. To accomplish these objectives, we implemented a wide variety of technologies and systems that involved everyone from students to teachers and parents. Many of these focused on improving efficiency, increasing involvement, and improving instructional delivery. In a nutshell, you can describe our project as one that seeks to immerse technology in every aspect of our institution and ultimately provide one-to-one computing for our students.

The second year of our project is coming to a close this spring with outstanding results and we feel like we are in a great position to move to the third and most ambitious phase of the project. At the culmination of the project, we expect all of our staff to have the necessary skills to perform their jobs more efficiently and have more effective methods for delivering classroom instruction. We expect our students to gain important skills and learn more as a result of the project. Of course these are broad outcomes of the project as a whole and can be attributed to many other projects implemented in the district. As a differentiator, we have expected outcomes for students and staff specific to each stage of the project and methods in place for determining how successful each is.

Organizational Change

To begin our project, we first picked a core team of district personnel to outline the project and participate in the ISTE Institute. This team included district office staff, including the superintendent, a school-level administrator, and a leading teacher. This team made some major decisions during the institute and following summer. These included curriculum changes for the schools, personnel changes, and decisions to hire additional staff to help fulfill the mission of the grant. This team then created a larger technology committee that was then charged with making decisions as to how to exactly accomplish the project. The district superintendent also committed to hiring a technology coach for the district that would be charged with creating enthusiasm among the stakeholders and helping them acquire the skills they would need to meet the needs of the project. In a fortunate series of events, we were also the lucky recipients of a State Department of Education technology grant, which required participating districts to hire technology coaches, which helped us afford the salaries for these individuals. The grant also gave us time, funding, and support for our project, which is critical for success. Our collaboration with other districts in the grant also proved to be a great benefit.

Other changes included moving a computer lab teacher to the middle school from the elementary school to meet the needs we identified at that level. That also entailed creating a new computer lab position at the elementary school to accomplish those objectives. These changes mitigated major curriculum improvements to match the goals of our project. During the development of these strategies, we also made curriculum changes at the high school to match those being made at the lower levels, increasing our expectations of what staff and students should be responsible for.

By making these changes districtwide and involving our stakeholders, we have made a more cohesive operation and have everyone focused on a common goal. By having the district superintendent maintain the vision and lead the initiative, we have critical leadership from the top administration. This also helps the schools maintain a consistent level of involvement.

Budget & Finance

As always, financing projects such as this can be a challenge. However, we have been extremely fortunate in our grant quests and they have been the major source of funding for getting this project under way. Without federal, state, and private grants much of this would not be possible given our current series of budgetary cutbacks and lack of funding for even basic services in public education. Regardless, we are committed to finding whatever funding we need to prove this project is successful and provide our students with the resources they need to compete globally.

Our first source of funding for this project came from a grant from Hewlett Packard, which allowed us to explore some new technologies and participate in the ISTE Institute. This was a major catalyst for our project and gave our superintendent the leverage he needed to commit local district funds to help continue and expand the project. During this same time period, we were fortunate enough to receive $400,000 in technology renovation grants, which allowed us to totally renovate our technology infrastructure and build the basic services that would be the conduit for what we would be offering in our project. We were then extremely fortunate to be the recipients of a 3-year technology grant sponsored by our State Department of Education from the U.S. Department of Education once they realized what we were trying to accomplish. This grant allows for $900,000 over 3 years and has been a major factor in our success thus far. (We recently got bad news that the federal government has since reduced this funding commitment, so we will have to make adjustments accordingly.) Regardless, the collaboration fostered by this grant and the emphasis on the technology coach component makes this grant invaluable for the continuation of our project.

Now that we are about halfway through the project we are working on methods of sustainability, which no doubt will be the most difficult part of the project once grant funding is expired, but is a major factor in proving that this project can be replicated in other places and sustained indefinitely. Our current plans include using local positions already in place to provide the services of the technology coach at each school. Teacher aid positions have been adjusted to provide services that support the project. The district superintendent has also committed about $100,000 per year in the budget to make hardware purchases that support the project once grant funds are exhausted. As indicated, we have utilized funds from a variety of sources to accomplish our goals and we will continue to actively search for new funding opportunities. Also keep in mind that the funds we have spent have been used to foster systemic change in our entire district and affect every grade and service that we offer. Our project is somewhat broad in scope and different parts could be replicated in different places for varying amounts of money depending on the need.

Professional Development

Early on we recognized that professional development was going to be a critical component to the success of our project as did our partners. In fact, at least 25% of the state technology grant that we received had to be used for professional development. One key factor in this was the hiring of a technology coach. Our technology coach spends the majority of each week working one-on-one with teachers in the classroom using technology. She also provides graduate-level technology courses during the year that focus on the skills we are emphasizing in our project. We also provide workshops during the year for teachers and staff and have implemented a Tech Tuesday program that runs twice each month and offers a mini lesson for a variety of technology-related skills.

Our State Department of Education also issued a proviso that requires every teacher to demonstrate technology proficiency. This gives our district the leverage needed to require our teachers to learn technology skills that promote the goals of the project. We also require every teacher to participate in goals-based evaluation. Through this vehicle, we can emphasize the importance of teachers gaining technology skills since one third of the evaluation is purely technology related and another third can optionally be technology related. This has been a very effective method for getting technology skills immersed throughout our teaching staff and to demonstrate our district's commitment to technology. We also now require certain procedures to be completed by using technology. For instance, all lesson plans have to be submitted electronically to the principals and most memos are now sent using e-mail.

Our district also created a new staff development room at the district office that can be used for any type of staff development and has examples of equipment that can be used in the classroom such as projectors, electronic whiteboards and document cameras. This has proven to be an invaluable resource for our training endeavors and makes our staff development much more effective.

Technology Infrastructure

Our project required a pretty extensive investment in our technology infrastructure. Our first step was to upgrade and install servers that would support the services that we wanted to provide. We now have a mix of 13 Windows and Netware servers that provide these services. Our Netware servers mostly provide basic network services and access to our network resources. Our Windows servers provide specialty services such as our BlackBoard Online Education Portal, Webserver services, Citrix terminal services for remote access to district resources via the Internet, ParentConnect server so parents can view student information via the Internet, and PinPoint server to allow searches of any of our library resources via the Internet.

During previous experiences with wireless laptop carts, we also recognized the benefit of wireless LAN technology. As a natural progression of this, we implemented a districtwide wireless LAN. We now have complete WLAN coverage on all of our campuses for both 11Mb and 54Mb devices. This set the stage for our next major phase, which provided every teacher and staff member with a wireless multimedia laptop. Teachers and staff members could then roam to any of our locations without sacrificing any connectivity or access to resources. Teachers saw the immediate benefit of this and we gained amazing support from them for the project. We were also able to provide remote connectivity to two of our remote campuses via wireless bridges that ran 35 times faster than our T1 and eliminated recurring charges from the phone company. This brought all of our campuses together in one high-speed LAN, which facilitated many of the objectives of our project. We also have laptop carts that are used in the classrooms by students and laptops/tablets that will be used this spring for student checkout. In order to enhance classroom instruction, we have also recognized the benefit of projectors, electronic whiteboards, and document cameras. We currently have nine projectors and electronic whiteboards that are used in classrooms Pre-K–12, but this has proved to be such a valuable asset that we are purchasing about 25 systems that also include a document camera. Every classroom at the high school will have a permanently mounted projector and SmartBoard with document camera. Every grade level at the middle school will have one of these systems that can be portable between classrooms. Elementary and early childhood schools will have several portable systems each for sharing among the classrooms.

Our next phase of the project will put a handheld computing device in the hand of every high school student. Each phase of the project has been building toward this ultimate goal of providing one-to-one technology access for students, and the technologies that we have chosen along the way complement each other for this purpose.

Although it may look like we have implemented a disparate conglomeration of technologies for our project, each technology was chosen for a specific purpose that promotes the vision we identified in our plan and offers services that complement that project as a whole. Although each of these technologies is useful in its own right, we envision an overlapping of technologies that are transparent to the user but provide invaluable resources for improving instruction in the classroom.

Outcomes

Of course, we have identified desired outcomes for our project and anticipated some outcomes based on previous experience but as with most projects like this, some of the unanticipated outcomes have been the most enlightening. For instance, we wanted our teachers to use technology to be more efficient with classroom management. Within a couple of months of having our new technology coach on staff, we went from having about five teachers using an electronic gradebook to almost 90% of our teachers using it. That was an amazing outcome and served to gain their support for other project initiatives.

We also wanted to improve the quality of student work as a desired outcome. This is readily apparent in juxtaposing artifacts from previous years with those being produced now and it continues to improve. Another desired outcome was improving student success on tests. This has been demonstrated by improved test scores on standardized tests and the SAT. Although we do not presume that all of these gains can be attributed to this project alone, we feel that this project complements others that the district is pursuing for a common goal. A full 100% of our high school students passed the end-of-year test, including special needs students, which is an amazing accomplishment. Assistive technology for our special needs students has been a major component of our project from the beginning and we have seen remarkable gains from these students. We really were not sure what results we would gain from this, but our experience has been outstanding and the gains of these students were a welcome outcome. Another anticipated outcome was increased enthusiasm from our stakeholders. Although it is hard to quantify, we have seen a marked increase in student enthusiasm regarding technology and what it allows them to do. Teachers are now more willing to try new things and use technology in the classroom. And parents are excited by the information they can now retrieve on their students and keep up with what is going on in their school lives.

An unanticipated outcome was the quickness with which our teachers adopted the technology available and overwhelmed our supply. We are now in the process of purchasing more equipment to satisfy the demand and get access to everyone that wants it.

Evaluation

As with any project, evaluation seems to be one of the harder aspects to deal with. With that in mind, we were open to different ways of evaluating success and methods of gathering data. We first used a team of district employees to discuss terms of evaluation. This gave us a foundation to begin the process and build upon experiences of district personnel. We then solicited advice from people in other districts and at partnering universities. Finally, we hired an outside evaluator to bring his experience to bear on our project. In addition, our State Department of Education hired a grant evaluation team that will give us valuable input as well.

A critical factor that we identified from the beginning was support from the top. Without the full support and involvement of the district superintendent, we could not have accomplished many of our goals for the project and in fact it would not have really been feasible on the scale we needed. This support is evident in the tough decisions that have to be made at that level and the funding commitment that ensues. Personnel and curriculum changes that are not always popular in the beginning have to be made for a project of this scale to succeed.

By pursuing the project on a districtwide scale we also wanted to demonstrate what could be accomplished by making a commitment to systemic change. Other districts will be able to look at our work and see that it can scale to any level given the proper commitment.

We were also very interested in using technologies that were available to anyone to prove that our success can be replicated by others in pieces or as a whole since we realize that our project may not be a perfect fit for every district depending on its needs. In this same vein, we also looked hard at what successes other districts had and tried them out in our district.

We feel like our project has been extremely successful thus far and our evaluations are corroborating that. As our evaluations continue, we will evolve the project and hopefully retain those factors that are successful and eliminate those that are not. Maybe other districts will be able to learn as much from our mistakes as they can from our successes.

Contact Information

Robert McIntyre
ramcinty@mail.dillon3.k12.sc.us
843-752-7576