Inadequate support infrastructure: Adversely impacting students

After 42 years in education and 37 years as an educational technologist, I recently retired from my latest position, chief technology officer of an extremely large urban school district.  Over the past few weeks I have been thinking about the various changes I have witnessed in educational technology over this span.  People laugh when I tell them that I earned my doctorate in educational technology in 1977, before the advent of microcomputers, for they cannot comprehend the concept of educational technology without them.  But something I recently read reminded me that while some things may have changed dramatically over the years, others seemed to have barely changed at all.

In March 2009, eSchool News published the results of a second annual survey and report, conducted together with CoSN and SchoolDude.com that focused on the unique challenges facing IT professionals in the K-12 environment.  An area that particularly caught my attention was the availability, or should I say lack of availability, of technology staff and other support resources in our nation's K-12 schools.  Much as the previous year's study, it showed that there were far too few staff to handle the growing amount of technology in our schools.  It mattered little whether you looked at it from staying on top of repairing and maintenance of the equipment or looked at it from the perspective of enabling instructional staff to use the technology more appropriately and/or effectively in meeting the instructional needs of their students.