Melanie Paliotti

National University EDA 612

Month 3 – March 2019

Site and District Technology Plans

Communication and Technology Plans are helpful to outline to all stakeholders of an

organization both the availability of resources and tools as well as the expectations and guidelines for
their optimal utilization. Although the Vista Unified School District hired a Director of Communications
for the 2018-2019 school year, I was not able to locate a specific “Communication Plan” on our district
website. Vista Unified is committed to the integration of technology and our school site is 1:1 with
devices for all students and teachers. Students in TK, Kindergarten and first grade use iPads and
students in 2nd-5th grades have their own Chromebooks. Although I searched the district website, I was
surprised to find that a comprehensive Technology Plan was also not readily available to our
stakeholders online. Most information about technology is listed but in separate links instead of in one
inclusive plan. I was also surprised to find that my current site does not have one complete plan that
documents the usage of technology TK-5th grade.

At my previous school, I worked with a team to create, with the input of various stakeholder
groups, an “Information Communication Technology (ICT) Plan” as part of the requirements of becoming
an authorized International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme – IB World School. We also had to
develop, with input and approval of stakeholders, a Special Educational Needs/Inclusion Plan, an
Academic Honesty Plan, and an Assessment Plan which must be reviewed and approved yearly and must
be readily available (in multiple languages) to all stakeholders. I have been working at IB World Schools
for the last 17 years and took for granted that these plans were important parts of our school culture.
The plans help inform instruction, the Programme of Inquiry curricular plan, and the daily expectations
and operations of the school site.

I was able to locate some information from our website, onsite documents and from my
principal about our technology plan at my current school. Our district, as a whole and each individual
site, earns the certification as a Common Sense Media Certified School. In order to achieve this, our
school created a Digital Citizenship School Plan to teach the importance of digital citizenship to our
students and families. Students in grades 3,4, and 5 participate in Common Sense lessons on good
digital citizenship and the power of words, digital citizenship pledge and citing internet sources, and
cyberbullying and privacy settings. The lessons are taught be our Coding Teachers throughout the year.
Students at Empresa receive instruction from their “Wheel” teachers every other week in STEAM
including additional NGSS Science and Engineering, Technology such as keyboarding and coding, art, Ted
Talks (public speaking and presentation skills) among other topics. We also had to create a plan for
parent outreach opportunities to share the message of the importance of digital citizenship. We held a
Parent Tech Night in August that was led by our two “tech” lead teachers. We created a link on our
website for families to access and created a home to school connection by having students share their
learning with their parents after the Common Sense lessons at school. We also encouraged families to
attend a district viewing of “Screenagers” about the impact of the digital age on children and how to
help families minimize harmful effects and find balance. It was an informative presentation for all who
attended but I wish that it could have been linked as a video on the district website or live streamed for
more families to view remotely if they could not attend.

In the 2016-17 school year, the district implemented a Single Sign On system to allow faster and
easier access to the many programs offered throughout the district. Using Cloud Connect minimized the
need for students to have so many different logins as the district had a large number of required
programs for students to use and also required a specific number of minutes on each of them weekly.
During the 16-17 and 17-18 school years, our elementary students and teachers were using Achieve
3000, i-Ready, STMath, Lexia, AR. myON, Smarty Ants, and several other programs. It was time
consuming for the students and teachers to fit in the required number of minutes and programs each
week and also very costly for the district. The programs were rolled out without much training for the
teachers and the data collected from diagnostic assessments and usage was not easily consolidated to
be actionable for the teachers. The benefits included personalized learning for each student at their
assessed levels to help them fill in any gaps that they had and to move forward addressing their needs
and next steps. This allowed many students to catch up with their grade level standards and gave them
the extra lessons and practice they needed and allowed other students to move forward farther and
faster than they may have been able to before. Teachers could utilize these programs for some students
as part of their Daily5 routines or while they were working with smaller groups of students on specific
skills. Too often, however, students were sitting in front of a screen and sometimes entire classrooms of
students were working online with the teacher walking around to monitor. The tools were not always
being utilized as they were intended and valuable instructional time that could have been spent with a
teacher or discussing and working with their peers was lost. Fortunately, as a school site and as a
district, this has begun to change not only for instructional purposes but also for financial reasons. The
district scaled these back in the 18-19 school year and even more drastic program cuts will be made in
the 19-20 school year as the district works to cut 14-20 million more from the budget. Next year,
students will have access to Math and ELA iReady (as it is needed for ELLs to reclassify per our Board of
Directors) and sites will have to pay for most/any other programs they wish to access. Our school has a
very small budget but we will have to find a way to fund AR for our school as it has become an important
part of the school culture as students and families track their progress and celebrate their
accomplishments with special AR charms, etc.

The district maintains a list of compliant, non-compliant and pending programs as per
requirements of AB1584. When a teacher would like to add software, programs or apps on district
devices, they must first obtain permission and ensure they are AB1584 compliant. This bill ensures that
great care is taken to protect the personal information of our students and what data is collected by the
software companies.

The draft that is now available from the state on the Progression of California K-12 Computer
Science Content Standards is interesting and informative and will help guide us in the future as we
attempt to better align our curriculum and instruction Tk-5th to ensure that students have the
foundation, tools and knowledge they need to move on to middle school and beyond.

Currently, in my role as the assistant principal of Empresa Elementary, I utilize technology all day
every day. I work to maintain the school’s website and Twitter feed as well as many other platforms to
keep our stakeholders informed about our school. We use PeachJar to send home digital flyers and a
program to make All Call phone and text messages to our families. I utilize Aeries to access attendance
and student information including documentation of discipline or parent contacts. A new program,
ELLevation, allows me to access data about our English Language Learners and RFEP monitoring as well
as reclassification. The other programs we utilize allow me to track data and progress for students – as
individuals, class cohorts, by grade levels or as a whole school site. I am responsible for our site’s 504
Plans and contribute to our IEPs. I am also the testing coordinator for ELPAC, CAASPP/SBAC and CAST
which require me to utilize TOMS and ensure our information correctly uploads from Aeries to CALPADS.
I feel there is so much more we could do with technology in the future and our district is working on a
comprehensive data dashboard which should make analysis of data much more streamlined in the
future. My goal is to improve my skills at accessing, analyzing and distributing data so that it becomes
more of a lead measure and not just a lag measure. With lead data, we can change our path and
improve our instruction to best meet the needs of all of our students. I would also like to develop a
strategic plan that aligns with the new Computer Science Content Standards so that all of our
stakeholders know what to expect in each grade level.