Technology Action Plan

Action Plan

Organization Chart Integrating Technology

Dallas Independent School District

Superintendent of Schools

Michael Hinojosa

The superintendent is responsible for implementing the school boards direction in technology. Additionally, the technology vision for the district is set and maintained by the superintendent of the district.

Finance & Human Development Division

Executive Chief Finance Officer

Larry Throm Due to past financial problems, the IT department was placed under Finance and Human Development. Larry Throm has recently hired to bring financial stability to troubled departments. This position is mainly for oversight.

Information Technology

Executive Director

Patricia Viramontes The IT Executive Director oversees what technology the district will invest in. The director establishes contracts with particular vendors that the campuses will work with.

Information Technology

Campus & Administrative Support Director

Sam Illya The Campus Support Director monitors that the schools have the technology in place that is necessary. They create the training for the technology specialists and technology staff development. This director establishes the curriculum necessary for the technology standards to be met.

John B. Hood Middle School

Principal

Fred Davis III The principal has the duty of ensuring the campus staff is utilizing the technology available. He monitors to see the effectiveness of technology implementation and education on campus. He oversees the technology budget and decides on what technology to invest in.

John B. Hood Middle School

Technology Specialist

Paul Newman The campus technology specialist maintains the inventory of the school, monitors the repair and maintenance of the campus technology, and teaches several classes of technology.

John B. Hood Middle School

Staff The teachers and staff of the school are responsible for ensuring the students meet the technology standards, security of campus technology, and modeling proper ethical standards for technology usage.



The principal must ensure that the organizational chart is followed. The staff of their school must follow through with the technology specialist since the specialist is the one who closely monitors the technology of the campus. Principals must understand the technology flow to the district level. They need to know which vendors to work with, curriculum that must be followed, and procedures for technology acquisition.

Professional Development Planning

One critical area that has been addressed as a concern for professional development in Dallas ISD is the poor timing and quality. This has been an ongoing problem for years, yet even with the available technology, the situation is not fixed. The district spends hundreds of dollars sending teachers to a staff development within the district during instructional time, and there is a loss of instruction while the teachers are away at training.

Dallas ISD is one of the largest school districts in the nation. There is a great amount of knowledge and experience within the district. Additionally, the district has the technology capability to improve the staff development.

The solution would be to create podcasts of the sample lessons that the district is wanting. Most middle schools already have the technology on campus to create the podcasts, and they have the hard drive storage to maintain the files. The content departments would find the most effective teachers in terms of style and results to model a lesson. The departments would then post the files to the server for all other teachers to view. A similar site is already in operation; it is Teachertube. Teachertube is a site where teachers around the nation can view lessons. The difference with Dallas ISD’s proposed site would be that the lessons are specifically tailored to what the district is requesting of its teachers.

MyData is a student data site that contains content for TAKS results, demographic, benchmark results, previous school data, and wealth of other necessary to know all students. This data is critical to show progress, especially for the new Texas Projection Measure. MyData would enable the teachers and district to monitor the effectiveness of the new staff development methods. Training for better use of the data site would be available for the teachers on the site as well.

Evaluation Planning for Action Plan

The Dallas ISD podcast site could easily be measured for effectiveness. Every time an employee accesses the site, specifically a lesson, it will create a ‘hit’. The more hits on a lesson will show the popularity of the particular lesson. The unit test will show a statistical growth between the teachers that utilize the site and the ones that don’t. MyData will show the results of unit tests between particular teachers that use the site and schools that use the site most often.

When the teachers become better at using MyData, they will improve their decision making about the instruction of the students in class and tailor instruction according to their needs. The two programs combined will add quality to the instruction.

Teachers will be able to post comments and suggestions about the technology and new staff development via currently used electronic survey forms in the district. The data from the input will assist to improve the professional development in the future. The podcasts would be used for campus professional development as well as the content professional development.