How Does Staffing Affect Technology Integration & Support?

How does staffing affect technology integration and support? That was the question I sent out to districts across the state of Texas and twitter.  I asked those districts to fill out a survey and self-evaluate how well they support technology (Technology Services) and how well they integrate technology in the classroom and curriculum (Instructional Technology).  I also asked how many of those districts were involved in some level of 1:1 device program in their districts. (here’s a link to that original survey)

What follows are the results of that survey followed by an infographic that summarizes the findings:

Participating districts data:

There were 28 districts participating in the survey, primarily from Texas.  Of those the largest had a student enrollment of 45,000 and the smallest had just 362 students.  12 of the 28 districts surveyed (43%) had a 1:1 program on one or more of their campuses.  There was a combined student enrollment of 256,000 students with over 210,000 devices being supported.

Who filled out the survey:

The majority of those responding to the survey were either technology directors, CTOs, or instructional technology coordinators. I recognize there can be a level of bias when it comes to evaluating your own level of support or integration, but I found these answers to be extremely realistic and the outliers tended to cancel each other out.  In fact, taking that bias inflation out of the results actually make the findings even more impactful in some ways.

Staffing Ratios:

In general, districts fund two technology support technicians for every one of their  instructional technology specialists.  As the survey data revealed, this has a direct impact on how well they are supporting technology (most felt they did a strong job of supporting technology) to how well they are integrating it (most felt they did a weak or adequate job of integration).

Outcomes:

A majority of districts (69%) surveyed felt they had adequate to excellent level of support for technology. By contrast, only 41% of districts felt they were integrating technology at least adequately with only one stating they were doing an excellent job integrating technology.

Those districts that scored the highest on integration of technology into classroom and curriculum had either one full-time staff member on a campus dedicated to that role or a full-time staff member that shared multiple campuses. Those with only one full-time district person to support the entire district or no person dedicated to this role scored the lowest.

Almost all (96%) stated that turnaround time on a technology work order was expected to be 5 days or less.

Only 28% of districts surveyed felt that they had “Strong” or “Exceptional” professional development around the area of technology integration on their campuses.  Those campuses that rated high in professional development also had more staff members dedicated to integration of technology.

Conclusion:

More people equals better support and integration of technology.  While that seems like a no-brainer, digging into the data revealed the a level of disparity between “support” and “integration” in these districts.  The ratio of technicians (1 per 999 students) vs that of instructional technology specialists (1 per 1910 students) seems to be the highest contributing factor to this.  If the technology doesn’t work, then you can’t integrate it.  That seems to be the mantra districts are following with these staffing ratios (we follow a similar ratio at Eanes). However, if districts truly want to utilize these tools for learning, it would appear the next step is figuring out a way to fund that professional support person to help integrate the technology, whether it be at one campus (ideally) or at multiple campuses.

Thank you to all the districts that participated in this survey.  I’ve conducted a similar internal survey with our own staff and would love another district to do the same so we can compare internal data.  If you are interested, comment below and I’ll send you the link.

Here’s the infographic: