Essential Conditions....ISTE

Here is a link to ISTE's list of Essential Conditions if you would like to learn more..ISTE essential conditions

This is a difficult post for me.  I apologize if I ramble.  I found so many holes in our districts technology plan as I was answering through ISTE's free diagnostic tool.  I never once selected "completely" or "always" excepts when I was answering questions directly related to our technology coordinator at our school.  He is always efficient, he gets right to the problem, and fixes it. 

I would like to focus my post on our community involvement.  But first I would like to say where we really thrived.  Equitable access we are meeting.  This is pretty important in a school in terms of technology.  If students do not have access, technology becomes a difficult thing to integrate into the curriculum and school culture, so kudos to us.  As I said earlier the other place we are doing very well it under technology support.  He is on top of issues and knows his stuff...a win win.

Whenever a question came up in terms of the community while I was filling out the survey, it was always answered "no" or "none at all."  This was incredibly surprising to me.  Our community is very involved with the school on so many levels.  We hold community meetings and events at our school all of the time.  The school gym has been used for voting polls every year.  The community blood drive is also held in the gym.  Our performance center is named after a local company because they built it for us.  However in terms of technology (other than one community member being on our committee) there is little or no community involvement.  Strange.  How do we include them?  It seems this is the only area where community involvement just doesn't exist. 

In terms of technology and families we do have a Twitter (which hardly anybody follows), some teachers use class DOJO, we have a school Facebook and we send out weekly newsletters.  Not a terrible use of technology but I would love to involve the local community more....businesses.  We have a couple large businesses in our little town and maybe some video chatting would be beneficial to our students.  It could help them become familiar with different professions.  It could help them understand the connection of STEAM to real life jobs, it could give them a better sense of what we have to offer in our town.  We often have the community come in and talk with the faculty, why not have some technologies where they can talk to our students??  I will be doing more brainstorming on involving our community with our schools district wide technology plan.  Our tight community would love to help I am sure.