Written by: Dan Maas
3/23/2009 

This being Spring break in Littleton Public Schools, I have an extra moment to do a little "house-keeping."  I've been meaning to post a link to the YourIT Magazine for 2009 but other blog posts seemed much more interesting and I have already distributed this to our staff via an email link.  YourIT Magazine is our technology guide for schools.  Since LPS is a site-based management district, we do our best to empower Principals and school leaders to make decisions that are appropriate for their local communities.  Since our school staff deal with their issues every day, they are best positioned to understand their unique needs.

However, as with any philosophy, there are pitfalls.  One problem that can arise with site-based management is the development of an unmanageable diversity of practices, expectations and tools thus creating an equity problem for the district.  Our attempt to address these realities is to seek to inspire our schools to follow a similar vision.  We seek to inform and intrigue with our publication as opposed to establishing rules and boundaries.  Instead of codifying our views on technology so that people won't have to call us, we wrote this document hoping people would get excited and want to call us. 

Last year's edition was a success and I attribute a number of important results that have been achieved since the first publication last year.  For example, nearly every elementary school now has a document camera in all core classrooms whereas a year ago only one school could say that.  ITS did not provide funding for this change but rather local donations, PTO fund-raising, school supply budgets and grants have supplied the resources.  This is the result of literally hundreds of people all taking a common idea and applying their special talents and resources to solve the problem.  This is the ideal site-based management scenario: everyone heading toward a constructive vision using their own best pathways to get there.

So to assure the blog has the link, here is this year's YourIT magazine.  We only produce this one time per year (it takes a lot of evening and weekend work) so over time, the exact costs for things shift, but it still makes for a good planning tool.  We produced it on paper for our PTO Presidents and the Board.  The rest of the LPS staff received a link via email.

I hope you like it:  http://yourit.littletonpublicschools.net

Trackback Print

Tags:

Categories:

Location: Blogs Dan Maas, Ed.D. Chief Information Officer

Your name:
Your email:
	(Optional) Email used only to show Gravatar.
Your website:
Title:
Comment:
Security Code Enter the code shown above in the box below
Add Comment   Cancel