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Technology meets needs
Cheryl Williams talks about making technology meaningful to everyone from the school board member to the classroom teacher. By Melissa Burgos Brown SCR*TEC Educators are not techies. Educators in large measure are people people. So those folks who are interested in learning about the technology, tend to be those folks who are interested in learning how to do things better. --Cheryl Williams |
 heryl Williams
is Director of the Institute for the Transfer of Technology to Education, a program of
the National School Boards Association. ITTE works with school districts across North
America, Canada, and the UK to support the effective and appropriate use of
technology to teach and to learn.
Cheryl is a superb leader of our efforts, she is very well connected to the many, many communities surrounding this work and has positioned NSBA as a leader and a partner for technology in education.--Anne L. Bryant, Executive Director, NSBA. |
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Can you tell our readers
a little about the Institute for the Transfer of Technology to Education
and it's relationship to the NSBA? In 1986 NSBA formed a local school district membership program called the Technology Leadership Network and I was hired in 1987 to run that membership program. When I came in it was 98 school districts who paid a fee directly to us. NSBA is a federation of state school boards association so this was a little bit different because it was a local school district program. For that fee we produced newsletters, publications, and small meetings that started in 1987 called Site Visits, where we actually hold meetings in school districts and look at what they're doing and ask questions. |
| Can any educator attend
these Site Visits? Anybody can go, you just pay the registration fee and go. I know that the NEA [National Education Association] is sending some of their staff people to Cherry Creek [School District, Colorado]. They're open to anybody and primarily the people that attend those meetings are from school districts in our program. They tend to be school district practitioners and some board members, but mostly people who aren't board members. So it's with an interesting set of attendees, and again, anybody can come. They are neat because the district describes its planning activities and what its goals were and you tour the schools and you talk to the kids. You can ask questions like "Why did you choose this product" or "Where'd you get your WAN installed and how do you maintain it," all that kind of stuff. |
| Those meetings started in
1987 and that program has expanded. I managed it for the first couple
of years. Then as I took over more responsibility for other things in
the program, I now have a program manager who runs those. We also started in 1987 an annual meeting called Technology and Learning. It was at the Infomart in Dallas where it proceeded to be held for the next eight years. Then we started moving it around and it went from a meeting of about 600 people from all over the country to . . . last year we had almost 3000 paid registrants and 400 plus exhibit booths and 5000 people in the Colorado Convention Center. This year's meeting which I'm sure if you've been on the site . . . It's in Nashville. It's at the Nashville Convention Center right. |
| So Technology and Learning
started in 1987? It was called Making Schools More Productive: Technology and Learning then, and we dropped the Making Schools More Productive after about three years. So it's been around, this will be the 12th year. |
| That's a huge conference. It's gotten to be very big. I mean it's certainly not the biggest. What makes it unique is the audience. We encourage teams of people to come from school districts. So about 20 percent of the attendees are teachers and about 20 percent are technology coordinators but then the rest are all school district administrators. We have about 12 percent board members and eight percent superintendents and library media specialists and associate and assistant superintendents and curriculum directors and consultants. It's a real mixture of job titles from school districts. |
| I was reading through the
titles of the workshops and there seems to be something for everybody. What's happened over the years as the conference has gotten bigger, first, we have those people who come every year who are "first adopters." They're interested in seeing the latest and greatest in the technology. But then, more and more we have people who are just trying to understand what it's all about. So it's a real range of expertise, in addition to being a real range of job titles and job functions in the school district. So we sort of think that is what gives it its strength as a meeting, because people from a single school district can learn from their colleagues all over the country as well as have time to spend with each other that they may not normally have in a learning environment. On the other hand, it also makes it a very challenging meeting to program in a way that will bring educational satisfaction to the attendees so we're constantly trying to improve it and make it meaningful for everyone from the school board member to the classroom teacher. |
| That's great because everybody
can attend and not feel like they don't know enough. Well that's our hope. We've tried to create some personalized spaces. Like we have a lounge for board members where they can go in and informally learn how to use a computer and look at Web sites. And then we have a lounge and a program area for our Technology Leadership Network districts. We have a partnership with 25 co-sponsoring organizations and one of our strongest partners is the NEA. To the NEA members we extend a special discount and they have a meeting room that they have for the duration of the conference that they program sessions in that are particularly useful to classroom teachers. So, we've really tried to reach out to a lot of people. You know, the principal's organizations are co-sponsors and they'll sponsor workshops about the principals' role and the technology adoption. So, you know, there's a lot of different ways we try to keep the program varied. |
| You mentioned the Technology
Leadership Network. Who is or can be involved, how do they get involved,
and what benefits do members enjoy? Well we essentially market the program to school districts, because it's a school district membership program. We currently have 425 school districts in 46 states and Canada and one school in the UK and I believe we have one Mexican school to. Anyway, almost all of them are public school entities. Some of them are local school districts. So you can be a school organization. The fees are based on the enrollment in the district and when we relied on snail mail for our primary form of communication, what we got from each school district is twelve names that we mailed our information to; the superintendent, the school board president, the key technology contact, and any other nine peoples' names they wanted to give us. So some school districts would give us nine principals, others would give us their technology planning committee, others would give us their school board. But our list, our membership list that we use for snail mail is a varied group of job titles. Since, we've had the Web site and the ability to e-mail people, we've been trying very hard to get current e-mail addresses for as many people from the school districts in the membership program. It's just difficult to get and keep. But we're doing a lot more e-mailing of information. |
| I noticed that there is
a place on your Web site that is available only to members. Yes, that's a searchable database that you can search for a school district that's the same size, that spends the same amount on technology . . . So that's sort of a networking piece. That's the only part of the site that's password protected. |
| What are the Institute's
major goals? I'm sure they've changed since the beginning. Well, and it's interesting because while we're a program of NSBA, our goals are very much consistent with NSBA's goals which is to: Support local school districts in their reform and improvement and [support] a delivery of education to increase student success and achievement. Now you know, as it relates to ITTE, our goal is to support the effective and appropriate use of technology in classroom schools and school districts. And because really the technology represents change, we try and support school districts in their change process through providing information, through providing leadership and through helping them network with their peers who have the experiences they need to share. So it's really a professional development arm for school decision-makers, people who are having to support the work of classroom teachers, who are having to schedule regular, ongoing, high-quality staff development that's about how you teach differently and how you manage a classroom differently when you have the appropriate technologies available. And then making sure that those appropriate technologies have been planned for, the funding's been secured, that there's been some technical support planned for, that it's really from a school management, leadership, governance perspective. |
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You know, one of the first things we put out was that it seemed to us
as though schools hadn't taken advantage, in intelligent ways, of old
technology. It was the only institution highly staffed by highly trained
professionals, where professionals could not communicate with each other
by voice technology. I mean schools don't have phones. And so, to get
all tied up with talking about the computer, when what we're really
talking about is changing the communications and management infrastructure
of an institution that hasn't really moved to the 50s much less into
the 80s or 90s. |
Now what personally brought
you to ITTE, have you always been interested in educational technology? No, I've always been interested in education. Actually, when I came here eleven years ago, I was working in a national women's association, the American Association of University Women and I was looking to get back into education, I'd been a high school English teacher. Then I'd gone into educational work and worked for AUW for four years and really enjoyed it, because that too was both public policy and leadership development, the whole sort of gamut of women's issues. I was ready to get back in K-12 education. With just doing the networking that you do when you're looking for a job, somebody suggested that I call NSBA. I called NSBA and generally told them what I was good at. I was looking for some kind of an educational program management job and they said they had a job and invited me to come interview for it. Well I remember when I interviewed, telling my soon to be boss that I knew a lot about education and I knew a lot about association management, but I didn't know anything about technology. He looked at me and said "You'll learn." So for the first couple of years, I managed the membership program and I just read everything I could get my hands on. When I first came here I felt very inadequate for the test, because of my lack of technical knowledge about technology. But what became apparent to me, after I'd been here a while was, what I brought to the program that I think has worked well, for me and for the program, is my ability to translate what teachers, schools, educators need and what needs technology can fill. And it's like a television set, I don't need to know how a television set works, what I need to know is how that television set can be used as a powerful teaching tool, what's the appropriate role of the video that's coming out of the television set, and what's the appropriate role of the teacher and how is it translated into learning activities. Interestingly, I find a lot of the arguments that are written about these days that are against the investment in technology for schools, really are as spurious as some of the early ones that said that schools had that technology. It's all focused on the machines without looking at it from an educational perspective. So, I can't sit here and tell you that I can run a huge computer system or an MIS department, and actually that's not my talent, skills, and ability anyway, but I read. I've read a lot. I've educated myself. Plus, the technology keeps changing. The first book we published when I first came here was a book called "Should Schools Use Video Discs?" It was before Hypercard was released, that was the big thing, the Hypercard release. So, the change has been so rapid, so ongoing, that the important thing is to understand how the technology works and the power it can have in schools. You know, one of the first things we put out was that it seemed to us as though schools hadn't taken advantage, in intelligent ways, of old technology. It was the only institution highly staffed by highly trained professionals, where professionals could not communicate with each other by voice technology. I mean schools don't have phones. And so, to get all tied up with talking about the computer, when what we're really talking about is changing the communications and management infrastructure of an institution that hasn't really moved to the 50s much less into the 80s or 90s. |
| Let's talk a little bit
about the ITTE's current projects and initiatives. Which of the current
initiatives are you most excited about? Well we've had a couple of new things that we've gotten some outside funding for that certainly are not necessarily the things I'm most excited about, but have certainly helped us to develop in new directions. It's always exciting to work with really talented local school people. You know, educators are not techies. Educators in large measure are people people. So those folks who are interested in learning about the technology, tend to be those folks who are interested in learning how to do things better. So we tend to, just by self-selection, work with the best public school educators in the country and they're dynamic and visionary and they succeed despite the structure of the institution. So that's very exciting and has been exciting from the beginning. The new wrinkle we have in this program is, up until a couple years ago, we really didn't serve or have much interface with school board members or some of the other departments in NSBA who did. About a year and a half ago, and with the help of our new NSBA foundation, we got some funding from the National Science Foundation to create a school leaders' toolkit which was specifically designed to aggregate Web-based information resources about technology's use and effectiveness in schools for school board members. It's linked right off of our page. We also have a companion guide that was produced for that, that has vignettes that school board members experience, like somebody stopping them in the grocery store and saying "What about this Internet thing, I don't want my kid to get dirty pictures, what would you do at the school?" Then it sends them to different parts of the toolkit to get their answers and to help them formulate the answers to their questions. It's really been an exciting thing to work on because we had some money and some opportunity costs and some time to think about that. We're an entrepreneurial program here at NSBA, which means that whatever we do has to at least pay for itself. It has to pay our salaries and our overhead and our out-of-pocket costs. Because school board members, at least when we started, were not much interested in all the issues around technology. That's how we ended up with an audience who was. So having this outside funding to be able to develop things to help bring school board members up to speed on all the issues has been very exciting and I think it's leveraged the work that we've done over the years. In addition to that, we have a couple other projects we're working on. One is called the Connect-Ed project and that's in partnership with the Consortium for School Networking and on whose board I sit. It's to bring together state school board association leaders and people in the states who are developing education networks to exchange information, learn how they can support each other's work, and continue to support the use of telecommunications services and technology in classrooms. And finally, we have some outside funding to develop information resources for a commercial venture called the Family Education Network. The Family Education Network is a Web site and listserv and chat groups and online community that's locally based and of course the Web site can be accessed nationally, that considers all of the issues related to parenting and there's a lot of good discussions on the site. What we've done is to create information for parents about school boards. Who are they? How do the function in the school district? How can you interact with them to help make you child's school experience more positive? Because a lot of people don't know who school board members are. One of our overall goals in NSBA is to raise the awareness about the role of school board members in a community and also to help educate school board members that their role is to really be the conveners of the community. [They should] be those people who get the community together to help them formulate common values and goals for the schools and are leaders in the community who support the work of the school, who don't necessarily micromanage every little thing but who show some leadership. By helping to educate parents, about who board members are, we hope to strengthen the work of board members, but all of that is a Web-based information resource, so that's been exciting. The other thing is that our program was selected to award the first annual Reed Hundt award this year at the Technology and Learning Conference. You know, Reed Hundt who was the chairman of the FCC who recently retired. It was during his "reign," that the Telco Act of '96 was passed and then the E-rate is being put into effect. So in honor of the work he's done, his colleagues and friends have collected a sum of money to give an award to a school district for the leadership it exhibits in bringing telecommunications and technology to their students. We'll be working on that selection process and that award will be given at the conference in Nashville. So in addition to everything we've been doing, all of which is fun, we've got all of these new things on the horizon. |
| ITTE distributes several
online and print publications, can you talk a little bit about which
ones would be beneficial to the K-12 teacher in the classroom? The Multimedia and Learning book has some good ideas on approaches and research things that have been learned about multimedia in the classroom, but there's not a lot of them that give tips on things you can do with your kids. The newsletter [Technology Leadership News] frequently has curriculum resource Web sites there and Hot New Web sites is always up on our page with links directly to those curriculum resources. And we also have a link to the 21st Century Teachers Coalition, on whose steering committee I serve, and any teacher can go in and register and share in the resource ex change that's being built there right now. |
| Lastly, you talked about
some of the projects you're working on, are there any long-term initiatives
you'd like to share? Well, like technology in schools, we hope to become more integrated into the fabric of the work here at NSBA, as opposed to a separate program. I've always thought that, if we really, really did our job right, we'd put ourselves out of business as a separate entity. We're not there yet, but we're getting closer to having issues about school change being supported with technology, to be a part of the whole menu of meetings that NSBA does for board members. So that's our long term goal. We'll just take little baby steps one at a time and learn to build new bridges with our colleagues internally and also with folks at the state association level. |
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