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Building a School and Community Planning Process |
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We began the implementation process by working with the schools in the first year to create a cross-school planning team. This Hanau Implementation Team (HIT) includes a parent, teacher, and the principal from each of the four school; union representatives; a military base representative; the assistant superintendent from the district; and other key district specialists both in computers and in professional development. The team has been meeting on a monthly basis since January 1996. They work from a shared decision-making consensus basis, together preparing recommendations about professional development needs as well as technology policies and access. The first areas of focus for the HIT were key decisions about where the technology should be placed and what would be on each machine. When we did our early technology surveys, the schools were amazed at how many computers were actually available, yet how few were used in a normal school day outside the computer lab. This process vividly demonstrated that just putting computers in classrooms is not enough. The needed ingredient was a commitment across the school to bring the technology to everyday instruction. |
The Model Schools Tool Kit
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Our project team worked with the HIT to design a way to bring technology into every classroom, to ensure equitable access for students and teachers. We reached an agreement that minimally two multimedia computers with Internet access should be in every classroom in each school, as well as at least one lab of 26 computers and a cluster of up to 10 computers in each media center. One critical decision was the selection of a small number of software products that would be uniformly available on each computer, across all classrooms and all four schools. We called this our "tool kit." We realized early on that we could not support the hundreds of different software products on the market now in individual content areas. Rather, we agreed that we could provide support for a common core of productivity tools, which could be linked in multiple ways to different content areas and grade levels. This first experience of making a key decision, garnering the resources to support it, and seeing it happen convinced the school community that this shared decision-making process was real. |
 
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