It feels like everyday is technology leadership day when following such great minds and collaboration on Twitter and the various Blogs I follow. I am excited each day to learn and explore the role of technology in education with such an invigorating Personal Learning Network.

Over the past year I had been working on my certification for leadership ad administration with a wonderful group of educators (Shout Out to SHU Cohort 24!). Through the process not only did I learn to think more like a leader, I began to explore how these skills could enhance my role as a technology leader in my building. For my final project, I really melded these two interests to being to plan for the future of technology in my school.

I work in a wonderful environment with students with learning disabilities. We are a transitional program to work on skills in hopes that the student can go on to be successful in more traditional academic settings. When I began there 8 years ago, technology was not a large focus, utilized for word processing only. I slowly began to show ways that technology could be used in greater ways, which lead to my role as academic technology coordinator. In this role, I worked directly with students to complete a project utilizing various tech. I worked in a bubble, with leaders knowing that tech needed to be there, but did not see its role in the program as a whole.

So my goal over the last year was to educate myself more and more about the available technologies and to use my growing leadership skills to demonstrate how these tools not only could benefit the acquisition of skills, but were going to be needed for today’s academic environment and that we should be teaching to their usage.

This process has been amazing as I have gained great connections, and have started some interesting conversations. I found the staff eager to want knowledge and pushing leaders to consider greater inclusion of technology in ways that were once resisted.

What is key with technology leadership is not pushing the tools people, but providing information and starting conversations about the who, what, where, why, when, and how their utilization. As my new headmaster, @bnpowers, a techie himself, stated to me, sometimes we need to provide the information and then step back and let others discuss and interact to determine usage, pros and cons. He is so correct. As technology leaders we analyze as we learn about these tools from a different frame of mind, often, than those who will really be using the tools. Teachers need to be directly involved in the conversations of technology integration.

So my goals this year as a technology leader are to:

1. To continue to curate my learning with my PLN resources

2. To educate my colleagues on the benefits of tools such as Twitter, Dropbox, and Evernote

3. Encourage other teacher leaders to blog..they have some great info that they should be sharing!

4. To continue to work with our awesome students to create amazing projects utilizing various technologies

5. And overall, start more of those conversations that need to happen about how technology can positively impact our already successful program

What are your goals?

@iplante