How do educational-technology leaders find balance between keeping the old and bringing in the new?

Jean Tower, director of technology for a school district in Massachusetts shares her tips in a blog post on SmartBlogs.com.

"As education technology leaders, one of our goals is to position technology such that it supports both the 'authorized' work of schools, as well as the emergent," she wrote. "Authorized is meant to include current communication systems, software and tools that are accepted and have widespread use in the organization. Emergent technologies are those that we are considering adopting or are intrigued by and want to pilot. They are the newer technologies, more innovative and might be untested locally but show promise elsewhere."

According to Tower, it is important "to find the balance between the two."

"If the focus of a school district’s technology department leans toward supporting authorized, legacy systems we would expect that district might be slower to adopt newer, more promising tech tools," she wrote. "I worked for a superintendent who always said that our strengths are our weaknesses – if we are really strong at network security, privacy, and safety, our weakness would logically be encouraging the use of new social media tools and interactive web sites. A hyper-focus at either end of the continuum would be detrimental to cultivating an effective technology program."

Tower said that EdTech leaders "have to see the paradoxes, employ creative solutions to support both legacy and new technologies, redeploy and train staff accordingly, and by doing these things well, they support a balance that will do both – support enterprise systems and encourage innovative practice."

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Article by Kassondra Granata, Education World Contributor