District Technology Plan

Houston Independent School District’s technology plan consists of several goals that include the four key areas of the Texas Long Range Plan for Technology.  The goals include ensuring that students are technologically literate, access to technology, promoting the safe use of technology, professional development opportunities for educators, encouraging community interaction through technology, increasing management efficiency and expanding the reach and capacity of the district’s technology infrastructure.  The professional development opportunities that are available include on-campus trainings and district trainings.  Some of those trainings include how to use: the smartboard, the mimio, Microsoft Office products, and PLATO software program for mathematics.  The campus’ Dean of Instruction is the person in charge of coordinating professional developments.  In terms of financial and time resources to ensure that each staff member is kept up-to-date depends on the school.  If the school has funding available for teachers to attend professional developments that may cost money then teachers have access to those professional developments.  On my campus, teachers have to be approved to attend professional developments and it’s based on the number of teachers that may be requesting that same training and the number of teachers that may be off-campus that day. 

Each campus in my district has a campus technology coordinator that ensures that both the hardware and software are working properly.  The technology coordinator also is responsible for making sure that the technologies are current so that students receive quality instruction through the proper integration of technology.  There is a sufficient budget to support the non-discount element if the amounts of new digital tools are reduced at each campus.  The evaluation process that enables the school to monitor the progress toward specified goals takes place at the campus level.  When the technology coordinator conducts inventory, the technology equipment is checked and updated for the most current version of the software and hardware.