13 modern challenges today’s school tech leaders face

A recent forum held for chief technology officers (CTOs) covered a wide range of 21st-century challenges, including one few saw coming: If the technology works “too” well, are tech leaders still valued? During the forum held by the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), CoSN brought together district-level technology directors to talk about “building a ‘Tech Department Dream Team,’ through a combination of panel presentation and table discussions.” Attendees explored the evolving roles and the expanded skill set of today’s CTO. In the context of what skills are needed and how roles change, many CTOs began by listing the now-common challenges faced in schools and districts across the country.

Challenges identified by forum panelists and participants include [in no particular order]:

• Equity: Due to BYOD policies and solutions, student-owned technology has raised new worries about the digital divide.
• Bandwidth and Infrastructure
• Funding
• Community Support
• Scale: Growing community populations, as well as scaling up effectively from small pilot programs to full-fledged deployments, require massive infrastructure changes, as well as more professional development (PD).
• Changing Mindsets: One of the newer, yet most “persistent” challenges faced by technology leaders, is how to keep the focus on learning rather than the device or the network.
• PD: As mindsets change, so does the definition of what makes effective PD, the report notes.
• Training and Support for Technology Specialists
• High-Stakes Testing: With testing moving online, there is fear that valuable technology resources will be diverted from instruction to assessment, and that the new Common Core State Standards assessments might now work well on district-owned or BYOD devices, said forum attendees.
• Fractured Leadership: Several participants cited “lack of vision” from district leaders and many discussed “fragmentation and isolation” as issues for concern.
• Technical Challenges: A rapid increase in student- and teacher-owned mobile devices on the school networks and the evolving system requirements of online assessments add new complications, said attendees.
• Security
• Perceived Value: “Ironically,” says the report, “if technology leaders do a good job, the technology becomes increasingly seamless and invisible, which can cause it to be overlooked as a necessary expenditure.”