If you think you have to fully understand everything about a technology before you allow it to be used in your district, you’ll never try anything new. You’ll spend all your time trying to anticipate problems, control small risks, and trying to configure things so that the genie doesn’t get out of the bottle.

My own goal is to make informed choices that encourage risks and trying new things. We do spend a little time anticipating undesired outcomes, but we weigh them against the outcomes we do want to see. We plan, set up guidelines for students, get parental permission when it seems warranted, and set it up as a pilot.

Here’s a small but exciting example. A high school teacher proposed using twitter as a way to communicate daily homework assignments. I supported his idea, so we decided to pursue the idea further. He ran it by his principal, who bought into the idea as a pilot, and then asked parents to grant permission for their child to sign up for twitter and follow the teacher. So far so good – the principal supports the idea and parents overwhelmingly approved. Now we’re implementing and will eventually assess the results.

My guess is that lots of our teachers, in all of our school districts, have ideas that will push the envelope. I say let’s find those educators and encourage them to take risks. Let’s make sure our policies facilitate such cutting edge projects and our support structures are flexible enough to accommodate them as well.

My goal is to position technology in our district such that it supports both the “authorized” work of schools, as well as the emergent. Authorized here is meant to include current communication systems and software and tools that are accepted and have widespread use. Emergent technologies are those that we are considering adopting or are intrigued by and want to pilot – things we haven’t yet fully brought into our district as authorized.

Examples

Initiatives in Each Category in my School District

I presented this classification to a group of parents and described our technology program in terms of authorized and emergent in an effort to differentiate between technologies that have already become well established as “the way we do things” and those that are new to our district, or are still in a pilot phase. After some really good discussion and questions (What’s the difference between a blog and a wiki? What is twitter, really?) I pointed out that most of the emergent technologies required high bandwidth access to the internet. I felt like parents really “got it” and supported the idea that much of the funding required for an effective technology program goes to fund what I call “invisible” items – bandwidth and network infrastructure. It was a great exchange!