Technology Implementation Strategy, Evaluation & Planning

Through professional development action planning, technology implementation planning, and our Needs Assessment, we will help you identify areas of concern that, if addressed, could rocket your organization’s technology integration forward. Most importantly, our insightful observations and data collection will give you a window into your school or district’s current technology status that identify areas to improve upon. Ultimately, we’ll provide you with unbiased, detailed recommendations that will help your school or district move forward with confidence.

To inquire about the services below, get in touch with our team.

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PD Action Planning Services

PD Action Planning, available from friEdTech, can be implemented by districts that want to thoughtfully plan professional development anywhere. Our process requires approximately 3 hours over a period of 3 months on the part of school district officials. In return, your district will receive a report identifying problems of practice in your district related to all stakeholders, including: parents/community, administrators, teachers, and students. The goal of identifying problems of practice in relationship to stakeholders is to pinpoint both easy wins and long term solutions needed for change and growth. If we don’t know where we stand, we don’t even know if we are moving forward or backward! Our experienced Lead Learning Guides will interview your stakeholders and determine not only your current status but also a way forward.

One of the highlights of this service is our customized Checklist for Planning a 1:1 Rollout. In this carefully curated list, we assess and summarize the readiness of your students, teachers, administration, central office, and community. We offer impactful suggestions and practical resources that will make a positive, lasting change. This step serves as the perfect catalyst for growth.

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Technology Implementation Planning Services

During our technology implementation planning process, we conduct site visits in order to collect important data used in our comprehensive reports. We can target specific areas of concern or take a more general approach. Then, in our unbiased, detailed report, make recommendations that will help your school or district move forward with confidence.

Services within this package:

Site visits

Data Collection:

  • Equipment documentation
  • Software documentation
  • Classroom Observation
  • Administrator Interviews

Reporting Services

Detailed reports of our findings will be provided both in essay format and spreadsheets with charts and graphs to help you understand our findings. These reports will address your areas of concern, which may include:

  • Is the software we purchased being used? If so, how? If not, why not?
  • Is the hardware we purchased being used? If so, how? If not, why not?
  • What are the barriers to technology integration we face and how do we overcome them?
  • What is our staff’s attitude towards technology integration?
  • Who are the “real” instructional technology leaders on our campuses and where are they leading our staff?
  • How do we build capacity and choose the best leaders for our implementation?

Conclusions and recommendations

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friEdTech Needs Assessment

The Needs Assessment Instrument developed by friEdTech through years of experience and usage, is designed to meet learner needs by assessing their area(s) of need and previous experience.

Initially, we asked educators to self-assess their skills in general areas. We believed keeping the survey short and to the point would yield the best results; however, this turned out not to be the case. When we asked educators, for example, to rate their Gmail skills from 0 (never used it) to 5 (expert), we found upon working with respondents that if they were actually very knowledgeable, they realized how much more there was to know about a topic and rated themselves lower; conversely, if they were truly early beginners, they would falsely believe that they knew more than they did. This issue caused us to inappropriately provide educators with needed technical skills.

We soon realized that if we used very specific statements with scenarios we received much better results that would allow us to more effectively ability-group participants. For example, “I know how to label an email to group it with other related emails, for example ‘Travel’.” With ability statements such as this, we started to have success with meeting learners where they were ability wise. We have tested our assessment with thousands of teachers of multiple grade levels and technical abilities, finding that if teachers self-identified as technically proficient, administrators almost always agreed. By having the correct audience, we can plan professional development that satisfies the goals of the organization and its learners. The best part about our Needs Assessment is it can be adapted to identify the needs of any group of learners!

"[friEdTechnology] gave us the courage to dive into conversations regarding PBL. You utilized a model I had wanted to use for training and watching you facilitate using that model helped me before doing it on my own."

Edna Phythian

Highland Park ISD, Global Connections Liaison