Dive Brief:

• The demand for personalized learning in schools is high and district leaders are turning to government subsidies and low-cost digital resources to prepare their classrooms for the realities of the digital age.
• eSchool News reports administrators and tech directors convened in Dallas for a panel hosted by IT products vendor PCMG, and they said the federal E-Rate program has helped their districts buy additional bandwidth and Wi-Fi equipment while the FCC’s Lifeline program should help them get internet access to students who don’t have it at home.
• Open educational resources create opportunities for cheaper classroom materials, but they demand a lot of effort to overcome data formatting differences, and monitoring quality takes time.

Dive Insight:

School districts cannot push ahead with curricular initiatives without considering the infrastructure needs that will support them. This is why collaboration between IT and curriculum and instruction departments is so critical. If both teams work toward shared goals together, students and teachers will see the benefits.

Starting small and growing from there is also a key strategy for successful tech initiatives. Many schools start with pilots, which gives the IT department time to ensure infrastructure needs are fully met and also gives teachers time to learn new technology and incorporate it into instruction. The early adopter teachers can lead the pilot while those who would have taken longer to adapt have that time built into a gradual rollout.