Shannan Muskopf
Fall Semester
Technology Coordination Q367

Hawthorn School District 73
http://www.hawthorn.k12.il.us/Technology/Plan/00intro.html


Component: Broad-based representation in membership of committee.
Rating: Acceptable
Notes: The plan has a list of what they call "Stakeholders". It is not immediately obvious that this grouping is the committee, though I inferred that it must be. It lists 4 board members, 10 community members, and 20 district employees. The rating received an adequate rating because it was not clear how this committee operated or what the duties of the members were. The committee had a broad base (community, staff, and board) but how much each member contributed was unclear.


Component: Ideals and long range technology vision/mission statement.
Rating: Acceptable
Notes: The Mission Statement goals seem to be more based on safety and staff development, one goal does address learner acheivement. Another part of the Mission statement addresses student development of respect, responsibility and other idealistic terms , but overall the statement does not seem to pinpoint any particular learning outcome and how it will be achieved by the use of technology. The actual "vision statement" is written as a story that describes the typical school day of a student, where the student uses email to contact teachers, gets assignments from the school web site, and even chooses her lunch from a computer menu. Lofty goals, but the mission statement itself was actually included in the goals/objectives statement.

Component: Needs assessment breadth/scope
Rating: Needs revision
Notes: The Hawthorne School District Technology plan did not include a needs assessment section at all.

Component: Equipment needs assessment and inventory
Rating: Needs Revision
Notes: No inventory or needs assessment was presented.

Component: Goals and objectives
Rating: Exemplary
Notes: The objectives for each goal are clearly stated and specific information is given regarding implementation: examples include how staff will be trained, how equipment will be purchased, how student and staff publications will be encouraged and web access will be provided in all classrooms. I found their objective list to be very comprehensive and detailed. Each goal has smaller objectives that will be implemented to achieve that goal, and I found the statements to be very practical and realistic. The examples provided also served to show how each goal can be acheived in the real world (or classroom) setting.

Component: Curriculum integration
Rating: Acceptable
Notes: The plan addesses how to integrate technology in the curriculum only in that it suggests forming teacher committees to create curriculum integration plans for each subject. The plan itself does not list any concrete items about technology integration within any of the core subjects. It does suggest how these members will be chosen, voluntarily and chosing teachers that have shown a willingness to try new things (they have another name for this group within the document of the tech plan, called the SEED program which is an acronym for Situated Educational Environment Design).

Component: Evaluation
Rating: Needs Revision
Notes: The plan had no section for evaluating how successful the implementation of its goals and objectives were

Component: Funding options
Rating: Needs Revision
Notes: No actual section on funding, but some ideas were included in other sections. I noticed that members of the SEED group could help pay for the costs of staff development by absorbing 5% of the district's costs. Also, interspered within the objectives were statements about receiving donated computers and trading in obsolete computers, some mention of grants. It was not cohesive or in its own section, so it was hard to pick out how the school intended to finance all of this.