I’m an Instructional technology Coach, and a building I have just started with this year has asked me to help them develop a 3 year tech plan. I’m very much one of those “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” type people, so of course when I read this post, it made me think about how this would apply to a building tech plan.

Based upon some reading I’d done recently, I already had a “different” sort of goal in mind for this tech plan.

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- Doug Johnson: http://www.doug-johnson.com/dougwri/maslow-and-motherboards-technology-planning.html

- Jeff Utecht: http://www.thethinkingstick.com/wp-content/files/planning-for-21st-century-technologies.pdf [PDF]
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After reading this post I started thinking about how true it is that technology is an ecology. I’m no scientist, but a few minutes on Wikipedia and the parallels leaped out at me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecology

radiation = administration & leadership
photosynthesis = transformational learning with technology
gravity = budgets
erosion = aging computers
conservation biology = IT Staff
niche construction = instructional tech coaches
Hadean period – 1990′s
hydrothermal vent = the internet
trophic pyramid = inverse of new Bloom’s taxonomy
producers = higher order skills
consumers = lower level skills
food webs = curricular integration

You could go on and on. None of these are literal, but they make a good symbolic analogy.

With that in mind, I’ve been thinking this morning about how a building “tech plan” could focus more on behaviors that support the ecology than on roadmapping gadget availability, as they so often do.

I’m starting with a supportive administrator (the Sun) and a limited seed budget for technology via the PTO. While buying gadgets is a concrete way to focus a tech plan, I’d rather build a plan centered on student learning and spend the money supporting an ecosystem that values technology. What I’m wondering now is how that looks in a “tech plan” format.

Thanks for expanding my thinking!