Selecting the Future

Resource selection is a critical part of an educational leader's role in education today, at least in my opinion. Many school districts and states are pushing to actively increase the amount of technology integration, especially in one-to-one technology, to meet the need of students to be exposed to technology in order to promote learning. Many schools are implementing one-to-one initiatives or have initiated one-to-one technology in order to meet the goals of 21^st century learning. For instance, the Nebraska Department of Education mentions on its website school districts to use for reference and resources to make the one-to-one transition more effective. http://www.education.ne.gov/neat/laptopinitiatives.html.

With this trend increasing rapidly, how do schools truly make the decision on what is the best type of resources to be selected for use in schools?


There were two articles that I found to be highly effective in describing the processes in selecting resources and ascertaining the funds to increase the amount of resources in a school: “Leveraging Title I & Title IID: Maximizing the Impact of Technology in Education” and “Choosing the Perfect Tools for One-to-One.” Through the process of reviewing these two articles, I determined a couple of critical aspects that I believe I focused on two key questions for my own personal.


First, what does our school need to make our students the most successful twenty-first century learners possible? Change in education is almost as frequent as a changing weather pattern. There will be a dominant trend that will maintain a long pattern, but it will ultimately give way to a new dominant trend. However, I believe technology is not a trend, but a definite mainstay in education for the foreseeable future. I find the most perplexing concept for an educational leadership team to do their due diligence to ensure the resources are selected in a manner that promotes the learning, advancement, and support for years to come.


Secondly, I think educational leaders must question what is realistic for our school. Do we have the resources to support the continued development of the current technology? Are the technological resources we are choosing going to be sustainable? I found our school to be on the unfortunate negative side of this with our one-to-one technology initiative, and we are currently in the process of playing a bit of catchup. An example of this is a sixteen gigabyte iPad. Whereas that might seem like a significant amount of memory, trust the opinion of someone who is not a selfie-maniac, sixteen gigabytes fills up quickly. Many staff members and students have quickly maxed out memory on their iPads, and what is next? Buy a new iPad after a year? In some instances, this has happened. I do not question the given advice for recommended iPad capacity, however, it is still a problem that had to be addressed quickly, and it is being addressed quickly.


Desirable resources will inevitably change as twenty-first century goals change and technology continues to evolve. A new group of students with much different needs will enter in the school with a much different set of needs than recent graduates. Maybe this will be a cyclical pattern as well. One trend I see happening in the future that inevitable, students in a decade will be much more technologically savvy than current students. I believe my twenty month old son that is able navigate an iPad is a prime example of how advanced future generations of students will be from a technology standpoint. Preparation, planning, and research will help me to feel comfortable when making decisions on resource selection. I do believe I will have a slice of humble pie and a good bit of reflection in the future on decisions of resource selection.