Does Your Tech Program Measure Up?

Three online tools to assess your school's performance

By Mary Alice Anderson -- School Library Journal, 12/1/2004

With so much money being spent on technology, it's important to know if your hardware and software purchases are making a difference in the way that teachers teach and students learn. And in this age of accountability, you can be sure that administrators and school boards will want to know if their investments are paying off. Luckily, there are many online free assessment tools that can evaluate an educator's technology skills or a district's implementation of its technology plan and initiatives—and ultimately help you better plan for the future. Here are three assessment tools that I recommend.

ProfilerPro (profilerpro.com), made possible through a grant by the U.S. Department of Education and the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, offers easy to administer surveys that target K–12 educators and prospective teachers. The tool has 17 surveys that assess technology skills and knowledge and 18 surveys that can be used to assess commonly used software application skills, such as Microsoft Excel, GroupWise, or Hyperstudio.

ProfilerPro is customizable, making it possible for you to develop your own questions to create surveys that meet your school's needs. A media specialist, for example, can create a survey that assesses the staff's ability to use research tools, or a principal can develop a survey that assesses his staff's use of online instructional management software. ProfilerPro's surveys are aligned with the International Society for Technology in Education performance indicators, which are accepted by colleges and universities as national guidelines in teacher education. Schools will be especially interested in the "First Year Teaching Survey" for teachers who have completed their initial year of teaching.

How does ProfilerPro work? A school or district assigns a "survey administrator"—a media specialist, administrator, teacher, or technology coordinator—to work with the High Plains Regional Technology Educational Consortium, which hosts the survey tools to set up your account. The survey administrator works with a school or district committee to establish categories of people you'd like to survey. My district, which used Profiler, an earlier version of the tool, established categories to assess teachers, administrators, secretaries, and paraprofessionals. We developed our survey by examining the 30 questions on Profiler's basic skills checklist and then modified and added questions that met our specific needs. Ultimately, we ended up with 40 questions pertaining to curriculum integration, the Internet, the use of technology applications, troubleshooting, and file maintenance.

Survey participants log in with a district account number, create a personal account, and rate themselves as unable, adequate, familiar, or fluent as they answer each question. The survey takes about half an hour to complete, and individual feedback is instantaneous. The complete data is private and accessible only to the survey administrator who compiles the results. Reports can be printed or imported into an Excel file to create charts and graphs that depict how the staff rate their skills.

As survey administrator, I shared our district's data with principals and our technology committee. The survey revealed what we suspected: while we all understood the basics such as how to access the server, no one really understood our district's acceptable-use policy on technology and we were reluctant to explore new technologies. Not surprisingly, those surveyed rated themselves as highly proficient when it came to searching the Internet for information but inept when it came to integrating technology into the classroom curriculum.

Taking the survey was an eye-opener for everyone, including district leaders who often perceive technology as being better or more widely used than it is. Classroom teachers ended up identifying specific areas of improvement, such as making charts and graphs with Excel, and were motivated to learn more. After completing the survey and distributing the results, we saw a substantial increase in attendance at technology staff-development classes and even added additional after-school sessions for the staff. The results helped district leaders shape the direction of our future staff-development classes.

Have things improved since we conducted the survey in 2001? Yes, we no longer need to offer basic classes such as how to use e-mail, but without the survey results, there may not have been a desire to seek more tech training. Now, our technology plan calls for another survey this school year to assess the progress we've made over the last three years.

Taking a Good Look at Instructional Technology (TAGLIT) offers teachers, students, school administrators, and parents six unique online surveys that measure skills and how people use technology. The survey's questions are detailed—for example, they ask teachers questions about their district's technology plan and the level of tech support they receive. But unlike ProfilerPro, TAGLIT (www.taglit.org) is not customizable.

The answers and data that the surveys yield will heighten your awareness about the diverse issues surrounding technology. Survey takers are invited to answer questions in their own words about the curriculum, professional development, and hardware and software purchases. A final report is provided with a breakdown for each group of educators surveyed, and graphs, tables, and comments are included. A complete report includes four possible benchmarks that describe the school's level of proficiency with technology.

In order for a school to use the survey, a principal must first join the free TAGLIT Principals Executive program, sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, BELL South, and the software company SAS in School. The principal may then designate a media specialist or another staffer to implement the survey. I assisted one of our principals, who was a TAGLIT participant, in accessing surveys for her school's staff and students. TAGLIT data affirmed what the principal already knew: her staff was comfortable using technology and the students had multiple opportunities to use the technology available to them. However, there were added benefits to using the survey: data collected by this single school helped its staff plan for higher levels of technology use.

You can log on to TAGLIT as a guest to familiarize yourself with its surveys and use some of its questions as you develop your own questions in ProfilerPro. It's quite possible that your principal is already a TAGLIT participant.

The School Technology and Readiness (STaR) Chart (www.ceoforum.org/starchart.html), created by a group of business and technology leaders called the CEO Forum, asks a series of questions that enables you to get instant feedback on your school's level of tech readiness. The questions are designed to provide answers to three essential questions: Is your school using technology effectively to ensure the best possible teaching and learning? What is your school's current education technology profile? And what areas should your school focus on to improve its level of technology integration?

The survey also measures how parents and the community use technology and their perceptions of how technology is used in schools. As a result, you can develop a strategic plan for improving the integration of technology into your school's curriculum and improve your program. Rather than answer questions about their own skills, survey takers focus on how well the school or district is using hardware, digital content, and professional development, and how well it's integrating technology into the curriculum.

Who would most benefit from this survey? A district technology committee, media staff, administrative group, or staff-development committee will find this survey most helpful for planning technology initiatives. Although our school didn't use this tool, it's helpful in identifying the different perceptions that media specialists, technicians, and administrators have about technology use. For example, a principal might think a teacher is providing a wide range of technology services to her students but a media specialist who works with the teacher on a daily basis may perceive the teacher as providing her students with little exposure to technology.

The survey results rank a school or district as low-tech, mid-tech, or high-tech in each category of questions. For example, a school can rank high-tech in its level of available technology but low-tech in how much the technology is actually used as a teaching and learning tool. My own school, for example, offers high-speed Internet access and state-of-the-art technology. All of our students participate in a wide range of learning experiences that include technology. Yet, not enough teachers incorporate the full power of technology into their lessons or address higher-level critical thinking skills. As a result, our school ranks high-tech in access and connectivity, but mid-tech in use.

Take time to examine these online tools and share the information with others who care about how technology is used in your school. The tool you ultimately choose will depend on what you need to learn and the resources you have to implement a survey. The results are sure to get the right decision-makers thinking.