3 Practical Ways to Use Technology to Re-Establish Your School’s Identity
Most school districts consist of a variety of schools that have different climates and cultures. There is usually a collective understanding of a school’s identity, whether it is positive of negative. Schools are sometimes known for their academics, sports, and/or specialty centers, and whether those facets are challenging or award-winning impacts the school’s identity. The importance of establishing who your school is and what it truly believes, matters more than most think. Inflexion, a nonprofit educational consultant group, learned that a school that does not know who they are and what matters most will have a difficult time serving the needs of their learning community. If schools are not confident in who they are and what matters most to them, they will latch on to any idea or fad because it worked for another school or someone did thorough research and produced a study that led to results. Schools should be sure of their identity so it is easy to comb through all of the research published and ideas produced to choose what would work best for the building and serve the needs of all stakeholders.
One way to establish your school’s identity is by using technology. The use of technology being integrated into teaching and learning is supposed to help transform learning environments for schools. In some cases, entire online schools, such as North Carolina Virtual Public School and Florida Virtual School have been built on technology helping to personalize and improve learning. The U.S. DOE found that technology ushers in fundamental structural changes that can be integral to achieving significant improvements in productivity. While learning and instruction take priority in schools, the climate, culture and identity of a school are also important. So, why not look at how technology can assist in establishing a school’s identity?
Below are three ways technology will help your school establish its identity:
1.Leverage Stakeholder Voice
Using technology to organize, disseminate and evaluate information is the most convenient and effective way to gather and hear the voices of all stakeholders.
If stakeholders truly believe their voices matter, they are more likely to be honest. The VCU Center on Transition Innovations concludes that “listening to and acting on student preferences, interests, and perspectives helps students feel invested in their own learning and can ignite passions that will increase their persistence.” Google Forms, SurveyMonkey and TypeForm are the top three applications to create surveys. The special thing about Google Forms for a project such as this, is it allows you to export data and organizes it into spreadsheets and graphs for easy evaluation.
The same form can be used for all stakeholders in different ways. As parents visit schools, the Google Form could be already open on a laptop for completion, the link could be sent via email or text using the same technology used for a weekly all-call, and if there are any connections to community partners, schools could ask for the link to the survey to be posted in offices or restaurants. Technology like Google Forms affords the opportunity to receive and evaluate feedback from anyone at anytime.
- Create and/or Update your Digital Presence
Using social media to create and/or update your school’s digital presence is a practical, cost efficient way to involve the surrounding community and its stakeholders in this process. One way to establish your school’s online presence is by using a hashtag. If everyone agrees to append a certain hashtag to tweets about a topic, it becomes easier to find that topic in a search. Whenever anyone chooses to search your school, the hashtag should be visible. The only way to do that is to have everyone who posts positive things about your school to include the same hashtag.
George Couros lists 5 advantages of creating a hashtag to use in the classroom or a professional conference. Arguably, the same advantages are true for creating a hashtag to use for your school’s identity: using a hashtag creates a community that is able to connect and share ideas with others in ways they may not be able to without technology, using hashtags can help tap into the wisdom of every stakeholder vested in your school, using hashtags gives you the ability to share the journey with the world, using a hashtag affords you the ability to discover and value all perspectives, and using hashtags and social media in general serves as a good example of how to create a digital footprint and maintain a positive online presence for students.
Technology makes it incredibly easy for schools to attract positive attention in and out of their community. If creating and/or updating your school’s digital presence online is done strategically, then it could mean positive press and donations for your school, attracting high quality professionals during a time when finding and keeping teachers can be complicated and contribute to creating a positive and confident school climate and culture.
3.Transform Classroom Learning
As technology continues to integrate itself into our world, education should be able to take advantage of its benefits. Strategic plans across several districts highlight 1:1 initiatives or plans to reach a 1:1 initiative and a good percentage of classrooms implement the use of technology already. In fact, it is a part of state standards across the nation. We have to be able use technology to not only substitute and augment, but to also modify and redefine. How can we effectively use tech in our classrooms to transform learning happening in our classrooms and to support student success? Lessons and learning can be transformed using technology models such as SAM-R.
The benefit of using technology to change or establish your school’s identity is that it can be easy, if the technology is accessible, to document the learning happening online. Parkland School Division started a 184 day blogging initiative that shares voices from across their division and celebrates learning both in the classroom and beyond. The blog features submissions from students, parents, and staff members as they answer the question “What did you learn today?” The initiative is an innovative way to not only document the learning happening online but encourage all stakeholders to help create or establish a school’s identity.
It is paramount to remember that creating and/ or establishing the identity of a school takes time, commitment and solidarity with or without technology, but we must get on top of using technology in innovative ways to benefit all stakeholders. And while we are at it, we cannot forget that we can use technology for more than just academics and instruction because the climate and culture of our schools matter. Let’s start making the most out of the use of technology to further our overall goals.
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