Toolkit voor onderwijstechnologie: Gericht op efficiëntie en besparingen

To provide the right resources for your staff, you need to gather the right team — teachers, departmental stakeholders, and others who engage daily with different education technology tools. Set up a meeting with some of your school’s teachers, department heads, guidance counselors, office staff, nurses, and athletic directors, and ask them to provide their opinions — positive and negative — on your existing educator’s technology toolkit.

If you’re feeling especially ambitious, you can even distribute a survey beforehand to better prepare for the meeting. This act of shared leadership makes your faculty feel seen, heard, and valued.

Once your tech audit task force has been assembled, ask each member to tell you the positive aspects, challenges, and shortcomings of every solution they use on a regular basis. List each tool and ask your staff the following:

Asking your staff what they need instead of making assumptions about what you think they need encourages real, honest feedback. Allowing your team to share their impartial opinions in a safe space will improve the chances you cut ineffectual tools from the tech toolkit to make room for software they actually want, need, and will use. Ideally, the more efficiently more tech is used, the more productive and effective your operations will become.

After your tech toolkit roundtable, it’s important to do some basic research about what each tool you’re using does. Learn about its most popular features, what it’s supposed to do for you, and how it’s supposed to communicate and work with other software.

Then, referencing your notes from your task force meeting, assess each tool. Does it unnecessarily complicate everyday processes? Does it overlap with the functionality of other tools? Does it integrate with other systems? If a tool duplicates work, uses excessive resources (labor, money, or time), or increases human error, it’s inefficient and needs to go.

Another important aspect of auditing your tech toolkit is analyzing each solution’s performance metrics and costs, and comparing it to similar education technology tools on the market. Are you paying too much for limited features? Is it scalable? At what point does it experience issues and fail? What is each tool’s average response time?

To answer these questions, run some performance tests, like load or stress tests, with a performance-testing tool.

LOAD TESTING measures the tool’s performance as the workload increases (e.g., downloading many internet files at once or sending a large amount of jobs to a printer’s queue). Does the response time lag, improve, or stay the same as normal working conditions are pushed?

STRESS TESTINGor fatigue testing, measures the software’s performance beyond normal working conditions (e.g., when a large number of users try to log into a program at once). By testing the program’s robustness and capacity for error handling, you can measure its stability, how it might fail, and how well it can recover.

Once you decide which performance-testing tool to use, it’s best to run it about once a year to ensure all solutions are operating smoothly. Perform these tests on weekends or days when the least amount of people are working to limit tech interruptions.

These performance tests help you better understand your existing toolkit — each application’s speed, accuracy, stability, and inconsistencies across different operating systems — so you can remove education technology tools that are impractical.

After you’ve surveyed your team about your existing toolkit, identified challenges and inefficiencies, and run performance tests, it’s time to start looking for the best solutions for your school.

These performance tests help you better understand your existing toolkit — each application’s speed, accuracy, stability, and inconsistencies across different operating systems — so you can remove education technology tools that are impractical.

TECHNICAL DEBTThe implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy (limited) solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer.

Without proper security measures in place, you put your school at greater risk for data breaches that may include leaked personal and confidential student information, such as names, birthdays, races, and behaviors (e.g., “unhoused” or “excessive talking”). Ask prospective technology providers if their products and services are routinely tested or audited for security. Ideally, your technology suppliers should be able to provide a SOC 2 report (or similar audit) that details security measures and protocols.

In addition to ensuring your digital solutions include powerful cybersecurity technologies, prioritize digital literacy and wellness. Create a digital safety plan about how to follow safety and privacy laws in your school — especially the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) — and review it regularly with staff, students, and parents. The more everyone knows how to prevent cyberattacks, the safer your learning community will be.

That being said, don’t rush to put a solution in place. Take the time to find tools that can automate your everyday processes without simultaneously putting some students at a disadvantage. As an administrator, it’s imperative for you to choose software that considers the long-term effects on children, education, and society, and does its best to prioritize human choice (i.e., lets students opt out of certain data collection without compromising their ability to be included in the system or use the software).

Remember the tech audit you performed, where you learned which tools play well in the sandbox together? Your new education technology tools need to speak to and work with each other too. If they can’t integrate with other tools and share valuable data seamlessly, then they shouldn’t be part of your educator’s technology toolkit. Integrated systems help you save time and money, improve work culture, and boost productivity. They also help provide more actionable, accurate, accessible, and secure data.

Consider a professional learning community, or PLC, for example. With integrated systems, your teachers can use different education technology tools to set up communication channels — shareable forms and surveys, email, text chats, or video calls — to share best practices and advice, stay informed about new research, and collaborate in real time.

While finding a safe, secure education platform for your toolkit is essential, so is ease of use. If faculty members, students, and teachers can’t use the software — or have to undergo hours of training to get the hang of it — your toolkit will prove useless, no matter how good it is. While researching various solutions, read reviews about usability and even take advantage of free trial periods to give the software a test run.

Running a school is similar to running a business. You have to answer to customers (staff, students, and parents) and bosses, provide value, and be productive — all while keeping costs to a minimum. You also have to be continually adaptable and flexible, prepared for whatever life — and the district — throws at you.

To best handle these challenges, it’s smart to choose software that scales up or down to meet your school’s ever-changing budget, staff, enrollment, and technological needs. Find technology that’s customizable, expansive, innovative, and can support increased workloads, users, and data. Scalable, innovative software drives creativity, engagement, morale, and productivity school-wide, helping staff and students use technology to optimize the way they teach and learn.

It’s important to set performance goals with your staff based on a pre-and posttechnology toolkit mindset. Learning and adopting new tech takes time, so give your faculty and yourself some grace as you attempt to meet or exceed old performance goals and make new ones. Set goals with your team, not for them, and explain clear expectations regarding how you’re going to measure progress so you’re on the same page.

When optimizing existing solutions and finding new ones, consolidation is the name of the game. To save time and money, centralize all standalone platforms into one solution whenever possible. This cohesive environment ensures better control, security, data sharing, and collaboration.