District Technology Plan (Visit Our Technology Department.)
The Quincy Public Schools has a vision that will shape our technology plan for the next five years. In that vision we see:
Every Parent – regardless of native language or socioeconomic background communicating readily with teachers about children’s progress, and parenting skills, without leaving home or work.
Every Student – regardless of economic level, age, race or ability – immersed in the sights, sounds, and languages of other countries; visiting museums; researching knowledge webs from the holdings of dispersed libraries; and exploring the inner workings of cells or the cold distance of outer space.
Every Educator – regardless of subject, experience, or district – getting hands-on training instantaneously; interacting with a virtual community of professional colleagues; having access to student performance information, and teaching tools that are worthy of each teacher’s importance; and searching primary source materials around the world.
Our technology plan includes specific areas to review. These include:
- Planning - address technology planning, policies, and expenditures.
- Teachers - address teachers’ technology skills, teachers’ technology use in teaching and learning, technology-related professional development, and technology-related instructional support.
- Students - address students’ technology skills, students’ frequency of technology use for learning, and students’ and teachers’ perspectives about how technology affects their classroom environment.
- Community - address technology-related community connections.
- Staff - address hardware, software and electronic/online resources, and technical support.
Technology Plan
The Massachusetts Department of Education issued benchmarks so that each district’s technology plan would develop a series of goals and action steps in response to the following:
- Clear Vision and Mission
- Assessment of Current Technology in the District
- Technology and Curriculum Integration
- Technology Professional Development
- Equitable Access to Technology
- Infrastructure and Connectivity
- Access to the Internet Outside the School Day
Our plan responds to each of these benchmarks with a major emphasis placed on the need to continue and expand professional development opportunities for staff so that they can effectively enhance student learning by integrating technology into the curriculum.
Educators in the Quincy Public Schools today are being asked to address twenty-first century issues with teaching, learning and management tools designed for industrial age schools. The new "basic skills" for the next century will require students to have the ability to access, analyze and communicate information effectively.
These information processing skills will enable our students to assume a productive role in an information age that is integral to our global economy. These challenges were mirrored in a recent article “A Vision for Life long Learning – Year 2020” with an introduction by Bill Gates.
“By giving students access to a new world of information, sparking creativity and facilitating rich communication and collaboration across vast differences, computers have long been a powerful tool for education. At the same time the Internet has brought an unprecedented level of great educational content to a wide audience, encouraging teachers to share curriculums and resources worldwide. E-mail has facilitated improved communication among administrators, teachers, students, parents and educational researchers, and emerging Web services technologies will create further opportunities for collaborative learning. Increased industry and government funding in learning science promises to vastly improve the ways technology is applied to learning. And in the years ahead, a whole generation of kids will leave college and enter the workforce with a broad understanding of the ways they can use technology effectively in their jobs. But we’ve still got a long ways to go before we can see how much technology can really do – particularly in education. Solving business problems with computers looks easy when compared to the often complex and little-understood process of learning. And technology is only part of the solution. All the computers in the world won’t make a difference without enthusiastic students, skilled and committed teachers, involved and informed parents, and a society that underscores the value of lifelong learning. Finding effective ways to use technology to enhance learning is a challenge that educators, academics, policymakers and the technology industry must work together to solve."
National Education Technology Standards for Students
The Quincy Public Schools hopes to meet this challenge by using technology to design effective instructional strategies for our diverse student population. Our ability to provide opportunities that will allow for a new vision of how students and staff learn, how teachers teach, and how technology facilitates both will contribute to the future success of our school system.
The Quincy Public Schools used the SouthEast and Islands Regional Technology in Education Consortium (SEIR*TEC) Planning into Practice Guide as the foundation for our 2004-2009 Technology Plan. In fact the introduction to each section of our plan comes from the Planning Guide and is identified by italics. In an attempt to keep our technology plan as a viable working document we have used our SMART goal process in key sections to set goals with corresponding action steps so that we can monitor and evaluate our progress.
The technology plan’s SMART goals in the areas of Curriculum Integration, Professional Development, Accessibility and Infrastructure will be revisited annually as part of our assessment and evaluation process. After evaluation the status of each goal will be determined as completed, on-going or in need of revision. Technology planning is an on-going process that will require us to set new goals during the life of the plan as we evaluate our progress and as technology and funding opportunities change.
Our society is in the midst of an information revolution that rivals the Industrial Revolution in terms of impact and intensity. Advanced information and communication technologies are changing the knowledge, skills, and beliefs needed to be a worker, citizen, and self-actualized human being in the world of today and tomorrow.
In some schools, the global classroom is already a reality. In this environment, students of all ages are able to readily communicate with persons from all over the globe. Students and teachers have the power to access and share data, text, pictures and sound with others from many differing cultures. Learning is increasingly occurring anyplace, anytime, anywhere, by anyone.
To achieve significant progress toward tomorrow’s schools, a systemic approach must be used to integrate and simultaneously address three concepts -- active learning, schools as learning communities, and integrated technology. If technology is to have a substantial and lasting impact, it must be used in ways that reflect an important new understanding of learning. Educators and cognitive psychologists have developed this new view during the past two decades. It explains learning as the active construction of meaning and understanding by the learner rather than a passive assimilation of information. It emphasizes the importance of intrinsic curiosity, social interaction and the pursuit of complex projects and genuine problems in the learning environment.
In addition to new concepts of learning, new models of school organization have evolved in recent years. These seek to establish schools as learning communities. This model stresses the importance of interaction among students, teachers, parents, and the community as they work dynamically together for the benefit of the entire community.
New patterns of organizing people, more flexible space, and longer blocks of time will enable us to use technology to its fullest potential for student learning. Information technology is an essential element in putting these new models of schools and learning into practice. It must be transparent to the user as well as integrated as a tool into a wide range of learning activities. It must be right there in the classroom where students and teachers have immediate access when it is needed.
New electronic devices will transform our learning and teaching practices far beyond those that have been commonplace for centuries. With them, schools will provide learning experiences which are active and stress team-work, involve complex thinking skills, focus on solving real world problems, increase interaction with people from other parts of the world, and approach learning in an interdisciplinary manner.
Seeing is believing. We see all this and we believe it will happen. Together, we can make it so.