The Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) annual conference, held Feb. 26 to 28 in Crystal City, Va., served as a springboard for several new initiatives the group is undertaking on issues such as data-driven decision making, total cost of ownership (TCO), ed-tech advocacy, and emerging technologies. Approximately 600 school leaders, educators, and technology directors attended CoSN's 8th Annual K-12 School Networking Conference. This year's theme was "Achievement, Assessment, and Accountability."

During the conference, CoSN, technology analyst firm Gartner Inc., and others unveiled a free, web-based application—called the CoSN/Gartner Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Tool—that K-12 school leaders can use to assess their technology investments.

The TCO Tool is the latest development in CoSN's four-year-old "Taking TCO to the Classroom" initiative, which has helped school officials understand the long-term costs involved in building and operating a network of computers.

"This is kind of the next step," said Sara Fitzgerald, project director of CoSN's Safeguarding the Wired Schoolhouse and Taking TCO to the Classroom initiatives. "We always wanted to create a tool for schools to assess their TCO. And, thanks to a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, we were able to do that."

Gartner created the tool by refining the TCO model used in the business world from 1,800 questions to 100. To help this process, the company used data from four school districts of varying sizes in California, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Utah. The results of these case studies are available on the Taking TCO to the Classroom web site. The new tool won't be available for use until April 1, but school technology leaders can start collecting their data now.

When using the TCO Tool, school leaders enter data about their networks, computing devices, software, personnel, and other direct and indirect costs. Based on this information, they'll be able to compare their own numbers against the range of figures that Gartner calculated in its work with the four pilot districts.

"School districts can't plan where to go with their technology investments unless they know where they are [now]," said John Bailey, director of educational technology for the U.S. Department of Education (ED). "We believe that this tool will help districts review whether they are supporting technology adequately to meet the academic goals they have defined for themselves."

Data-driven decision making

To help school leaders make sound decisions with the data they collect, CoSN—in partnership with IBM, SAS Institute, and Educational Testing Service—is undertaking a new leadership initiative called 3D: The Vision to Know and Do.

CoSN launched the web site for 3D, which stands for "data-driven decision making," as a response to the challenges teachers and administrators at the school, district, and state levels face in understanding how to use data appropriately as a tool to improve student learning. The web site will serve as a rich depository of information on the topic.