August 2008 — Special Feature
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Make It Count
Budget crunches are elevating the need for K-12 technology leaders to demonstrate a favorable return on investment. Here's how to ensure you're getting what you pay for.
HOW CAN ROI be demonstrated?
It's the conundrum now facing school ed tech leaders as the struggling national economy has district administrators watching over technology expenditures ever closer, insisting on a positive, demonstrable return on investment. Technology coordinators and other district personnel involved in tech procurement must account for the educational value of every purchase, so they are seeking any method available that can reveal a technology tool's impact on student learning.
Demonstrating the value of a technology project can be problematic because the success or failure of any initiative depends on a host of factors, from implementation strategy to staff buy-in. Do teachers get excited by a new tool in the classroom, or is it considered a foreign object-- even an intruder? The very best technology investments can fall flat if the district culture doesn't encourage technology integration, and if users don't embrace new tools and commit to using them to their fullest advantage.
Generally, technology coordinators don't cite specific metrics they use to measure how well an initiative is working, but most say there are two fundamental yardsticks: tracking usage and, the clincher, charting student achievement. It's the first step, however-- making a smart purchase-- that may be the most important one in guaranteeing a healthy ROI.
Keeping Up
Any large outlay of money had better be preceded by the necessary legwork to ensure that the purchase is a good one. For technologists, keeping tabs on-- and contributing to-- the industry grapevine about the newest technologies and latest research is an obligatory part of the job, helping lead them to the best products and steer them away from technologies that underperform.
To keep themselves up to date, many districts turn to scholarly and scientific research from cutting-edge research organizations nationwide. The most common-- and most reliable-- sources are: the Metiri Group, an educational think tank in Culver City, CA; MDRC, an education-oriented public policy organization with offices in New York City and Oakland, CA; the Washington, DC-based Consortium for School Networking, an organization of K-12 technology leaders; and Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning, an independent, nonprofit research group in Denver.
Naturally, with research projects going on all the time, this database of knowledge expands as new theories, techniques, and strategies for learning are introduced and tested.
Many districts, including some of the larger ones in California and Illinois, employ one or two specialists who are tasked with reading blogs and trade magazines, and finding other innovative strategies to keep on top of the latest information (see "Researching the Research"). Other districts, such as Loudoun County Public Schools (VA), expect all individual school administrators to follow current research trends on their own, and share what they find with colleagues.
The Loudoun approach is called Loudoun Vital. Through this program, district administrators meet regularly with school principals and assistant principals, and together they share some of the best practices each has discovered between meetings. According to Lynn McNally, the district's technology resource supervisor, the regularity of the meetings has created a culture of individual responsibility mixed with group collaboration that trickles down to the educators themselves. Every August, when the district holds three days of professional development, staff members catch up on research they've read throughout the year.
