Cherry Creek Schools
HOMEPAGE

The Cherry Creek School District is changing the teaching and learning environment for teachers and students by applying effective instructional practices, technology uses, and technological infrastructure to directly target and accomplish our student achievement objectives. We began the process by developing a comprehensive five-year district technology plan which aims best practices in technology use directly at enhancing student achievement. The goals of our program are designed to ensure that students and teachers have modern, powerful technology that will help them apply skills necessary to thrive in today's digital age. We expect teachers to become developers of technology integrated curriculum and students to become critical thinkers, problem solvers, and life-long learners. Our goals include:

• Using technology to enhance student achievement.
• Engaging teachers in ongoing professional development focused on student achievement through technology use.
• Establishing an electronic culture within the district.
• Evaluating technology use in the district to ensure its application to enhance student achievement.

The primary focus of our program is to put a critical mass of technology in classrooms where students can use it to apply critical thinking and problem solving skills, along with basic skills to meet the District student achievement objectives. To accomplish this, we use a solutions approach to purchase new technology. Solutions consist of hardware, software, professional development, and model curriculum and have evidence of being effective for student achievement. Schools write and evaluate annual technology plans, which focus on how technology can meet the building's student achievement goals.

Professional development is the key to ensuring that technology is integrated with the curriculum. We consistently spend one third of our annual technology budget on professional development. The most significant piece of our professional development comes from site-based Student Achievement Specialists (SAS). The SAS is a certified classroom teacher who understands school reform, instruction, curriculum, and how technology can enhance learning. The SAS is provided with a half to a full day of release time daily to conduct professional development in their buildings. The District and the school share the funding for the SAS position. To foster and guide these professional development efforts in the buildings, the District provides four Teaching, Learning, and Technology Specialists (TLTS) to support the schools. The TLTS provides support and training for the building SAS and works under the direction of the Director of Technology, Stephen Cowdrey.

The advances made in instruction could not be accomplished without the infrastructure and technical support provided at the district level. We have installed wide area, local area, and video networks in every school. Every classroom has a high-speed connection to the Internet and all students and staff have e-mail addresses provided by the District. An intranet is in place to store, share and quickly disseminate information and resources. We have district level technical support services which, at the least, provides for a half day of onsite technical support at elementary schools and a full day of onsite technical support at middle and high schools each week.

The success of our program lies in ongoing per pupil funding. The school programs are funded through per pupil capital reserve money and decentralized budgets. The money for the infrastructure was funded through a $5 million bond election. We recently passed a budget election of which $.8 million annually is designated for technology. This allows us to be completely funded from ongoing sources.

We are currently in the fourth year of our five-year technology plan and we will write a new plan in the fall. Our ongoing evaluation of our first technology plan demonstrates we are successful. Our SAT and ITBS scores have increased over the course of our technology implementation and are at an all time high in the District. We are also measuring ourselves against the StaR chart from the CEO Forum, the National Educational Technology Standards, and the Professional Development Indicators and Seven Dimensions of the Milken Exchange. We are making considerable progress on every one of these measures. We were a site visit district for the National School Boards Association (NSBA) last year, we were recently featured by Apple Computer in a nationwide satellite broadcast for our professional development program, and we will be featured in a video salute at this year's NSBA/ Institute for the Transfer of Technology in Education's (ITTE) Technology + Learning Conference.