Session 10: Assessing Your School's Needs

In this section you will be going out again and asking several people some questions about the present and the path. Where are they now and what do they see as the factors that hinder or facilitate accomplishing their vision of possibilities? Once you have some answers to these questions, you'll be in a position to draft some objectives and prioritize them for your technology use plan.

Here are some sample questions aimed at eliciting information about the present and path from a variety of sources with respect to the four success factors we've looked at thus far (we'll look at four more factors in the next module):

Teachers
• "With what specific learning activities and software do you use computers when teaching your students?"
  
  
  
• What types of staff development activities have you found most useful in the past?
  
  
• What could school administrators do to help you start using technology with your students?
  
  
• What kinds of assessment do you use in your courses?

Students

• "Do you have access to a computer outside of school that you use for your schoolwork?" "Is it connected to the Internet?"
  
  
• "How often do you use computers in your classes? Do you have access to a computer when you need it in school?"
  
  
• "What activities do you use computers for most?"

Administrators

• "What types of incentives do teachers have to integrate technology in their curriculum?"
  
  
• "Do you use email?"
  
  
• "What do you see as the biggest block to teachers integrating technology in their curriculum?"

Physical Plant Managers

• "To what extent does security pose a special problem with respect to classroom computers?"
  
  
• "What is your most urgent need with respect to keeping current classroom computers up and running?"
  
  
• "What problems do you see down the road as district teachers use computers more and more in their classrooms?"

Exercise

Try drafting and asking some of these questions yourself. With a partner (assigned to you by your instructor):

1. Contact your partner by email. Ask them which stakeholder they most closely resemble, or want to "play." If, for example, your partner is an administrator... you get the idea! If your partner doesn't seem to fit any of the stakeholder descriptions, have them play a physical plant manager.
   
   
2. Use the questions above to spark your thoughts, and draft at least six questions for your partner to answer about the current state of technology in their school(s) and what they feel would facilitate or hinder further integration.
   
   
3. Post these questions on the EDTEC 596 Newsgroup. Do not email them.
   
   
4. Email your partner when you have posted the questions and ask them to answer them on the Newsgroup (again, not by email, so that everyone in the class can be inspired by your brilliant questions -- and their revealing answers).
   
   
5. Now draft one objective for your Technology Use Plan based on the answers you obtained from your questions from Session 4 and this exercise. Follow the format outlined in the Connect section unless you have a format you prefer. Be sure it is a 3 to 5 year plan with some budget figures attached, and that you account for several of the success factors as you draft it. This component will blend into your final assignment, so we'd like you to post this objective to the course Newsgroup so that all of us can share our ideas with one another, thereby helping to make all of the final projects that much better.

Page authors: Bob Hoffman and Caleb Clark
URL: edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/edtec596r/index.html
Last updated: February 20, 1998