The Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) is a professional organization for school technology leaders. It provides leadership, community and advocacy tools essential for school leaders. The CoSN website is a bit overwhelming with all of the information that it contains.
One of the links that was the most helpful was the Total Cost of Ownership. The information it provided in the checklist for efficient operations was very good. It pointed out some areas that I do not typically deal with in a small school, like a centralized help desk, but that I may deal with in the future.
This site will be useful to districts in numerous ways. I would make this my first source of information when my district is working on its technology plan. Districts should be sure to refer to the Total Cost of Ownership, Value of Investment pages as they make decisions about purchases ranging from servers, computers, software, printers and ink.
Technology planning in my district has not, and probably will not become a very formal process like it is the larger districts. Our technology committee includes the superintendent, HS principal, and Tech Director. We gather our information from teachers throughout the year and usually just decide how many new computers we will need to replace outdated ones. We have some discussion about what features we would like the new computers to have. In recent years we have also been looking into adding Mac's into out building. We are piloting it with a few Macbooks and iPads but we dont really have a plan in mind yet. This site will help us ask the right questions and make the best decisions about our future purchases.
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