As part of the Digital Education Leadership program at Seattle Pacific University we are asked to interview a school administer about the digital readiness of our school. For this project I choose to interview the Senior Director of my campus as well as email our technology specialist located at a different campus. The questions I produced for the interview were based on Ribble’s nine elements of Digital Citizenship and the ISTE Coaching Standards.
The Questions:
1. What does the access of technology look like among our different school campus’ and grade levels? What devices and/or programs are our teachers being given to support learning in their classrooms?
2. How are we using technology to support 21st century learners? What ways can we utilize technology to grow our program?
3. Has our school implemented any curriculum or technology standards around teaching digital citizenship and digital literacy to our students? If not, have we thought about this being a goal for us to strive for?
4. How do you feel our training and resources revolving around using technology in the classroom can be improved?
5. What is your vision for using technology in our school for the future? What goals related to technology do you have for our school? What are the next steps to achieving these goals?
After completing my interview with the Senior Director, I felt it would be beneficial to send a few of these questions to our main campus’ technology specialist to get some better clarification. I also did some research of my own on our schools’ website which provided information on the demographics along with the available devices and programs our school has recently adopted. One thing I learned through this experience is that not all campuses within my school’s organization has the same access to technology. While our main campus had every classroom full of technology along with a weekly technology class, our smaller campuses were given little to no accessibility to the same technology.
As far as Digital Readiness I would say that one campus seems they have a good grasp on teaching Digital Readiness to their students, but the remaining 3 campuses are not in the same situation. While one campus has adopted google’s “Be Internet Awesome” technology curriculum which aligns with ISTE standards, the others have not been given the same opportunity. I feel that due to one campus succeeding in their ability to integrate Digital Citizenship standards into their school than we should aim for the other campuses to do the same.
Sources:
“Be Internet Awesome.” Google, beinternetawesome.withgoogle.com/en_us.
ISTE Standards. https://www.iste.org/standards/for-coaches
Ribble, M. & Miller, T.N. (2013). “Educational Leadership in an Online World: Connecting Students to Technology Responsibly, Safely, and Ethically,” Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 17:1, 137-45.
