http://www.shack.ca/index.php?id=14
I was very fortunate in working towards my district’s technology plan to have a very committed and excited group of stakeholders to work with. In fact, they were so excited after our first meeting that our Controller of Finance pulled me aside afterwards to make sure I knew there were limits to how much we could spend (bummer!)
So, as we were talking about how nice it would be to have a smartboard in every classroom I got to thinking about how I could let the committee dream, but still stay within the budget handed down. For our last meeting I presented the Classroom Technology Configurator, an Excel spreadsheet that allowed the committee to place technology at different levels of the board and instantly see the financial impact of their decisions. Within our budget it allowed the committee to see that in order to continue with our Teacher laptop project, we could not put Smartboards in every classroom.
The spreadsheet was pre-populated with our budget, what I thought to be reasonable lifespans for each piece of equipment, the cost of equipment and the number of times it would need to be replaced in our planning horizon (6 years). The cost of the technology chosen is automatically subtracted from the available budget. It allows for some great “what-if” discussions, we worked on the spreadsheet in pairs and it led to some amazing ideas and conversation. An example is, what if we put a video conference unit in every school…$200K. That could buy 125 laptops…then maybe we can put 5 video conference units at the board office and loan them to schools as needed!
The configurator is available at http://www.shack.ca/files/classtechnologyconfigurator.xls
I hope you find it useful!
Keywords: Education, educational technology, management, technology