What is Leadership to do in a 21st Century Technological World?

The School Technology and Readiness Chart, STaR Chart, is a great tool for a local campus to help understand where they are technologically. I have been looking at the area of Leadership, Administration and Instructional Support as it applied to our campus technology because I considered it to be a strong point for our campus. What I found was some very strong areas and some areas in need of improvement. Our campus ranks right along with the majority of campuses in this area where 55 % (4444 of 8087) of all reporting campuses are at the Advanced Tech level of progress. This level is described as having several apparent components. First, there is board approval of our campus technology plan and that our superintendent supports the plan. Our school board and central administration do a good job in support of our individual campuses. Secondly, we do meet the 1 technical support staff for every 500 computers in our district with 1640 computers and 4 members on our technical support staff. We also have a full-time district technology director. Not only that but it looks like this year our campus technology representatives will not have any classroom responsibilities but will be our local technology experts. This is a big breakthrough for each campus and they should be able to help us in several of our technology needs. Third, we do have a technology allotment, with some grants and local funding. This is one part of this area, budget, that we are rated early tech with a 1. This area is a tough one which I believe we should be looking for alternative ways to meet our technological needs. Some of our teachers have done so on an independent basis since we have no real community stakeholders to reach out to in this area. Our campus is located in a small rural community roughly 8 miles from our central office and no large businesses to reach out to. This is something we will need to delve into to help take up the shortfall we see in our local budget. The strongest part of this area of leadership is the leadership and vision realm. Our administrative staff does a great job in providing data, modeling how to use the data, and making time for us to disaggregate the data and collaborate over what the data points to. Well, enough of this for now and next on the agenda is a look at the progress report of the Long-Range Plan for Technology. I wonder how we have done so far.