SuperTECH NEWS is the monthly newsletter of the BLE GROUP's CIO-Time Share service, which provides small- and medium-size school systems with supplementary technology management to produce high-quality educational results and efficient management. The purpose of SuperTECH NEWS is to provide education decision makers with concise information that allows them to make informed technology decisions to impact instruction, management and communication.

Our February issue theme is "Technology for Accountability" and features:

• Technology components of the new Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)
• Analysis and discussion of instructional managers. These Web-based applications will be the prime applications to support accountability. This section discusses the current status of instructional managers and provides write-ups on eight name brands.

SuperTECH NEWS is organized as follows: (Click on what you want to read)

	Note from Eliot—An introduction to the CIO-Time Share Service, and the BLE GROUP by Eliot Levinson, CEO
	Theme of the Month—Technology funding and technology provisions of ESEA, the No Child Left Behind Act 2001
	New Products—"Instructional Managers," a discussion of instructional managers in general and specific comments on known brands
	Best Practices—Lessons to be learned from Oswego, N.Y., www.oswego.org, a district that uses technology to address standards, professional development and testing
	Practitioner Profile—Helen McCracken, a curriculum director in Canonsburg, Penn., provides information on a process for choosing an instructional management system
	Conferences—Relevant conferences in the next 90 days

We want to hear from you. Is SuperTECH NEWS helpful? What do you want us to feature and what topics do you think we should address? Please write us at eliot@blegroup.com.

THE BLE GROUP AND CIO TIME-SHARE SERVICE

This is the first SuperTECH NEWS newsletter. In keeping with our aim of giving you interesting information that is useful on Monday morning, I will try to heed my own advice and provide a concise introduction.

WHO IS THE BLE GROUP? We're a group of 25 educational technology directors and school administrators who use technology to improve instruction and management. Over the last three years, we've developed technology plans and provided management services in over 40 school systems.

Eliot Levinson is the CEO of the BLE GROUP. Levinson founded the BLE GROUP (www.blegroup.com) in 1998 and has worked in over 40 school districts. Levinson is known nationally for his work in technology planning and management for school districts. He co-authors "Tech from the Top," a monthly column in Converge Magazine. He has experience in education and technology as a teacher in California and Pennsylvania, a middle school principal in Massachusetts and an Assistant to the chancellor of schools in New York City. He has held research positions in educational change at the Rand corporation and MIT's Sloan School of Management.

THE BLE GROUP's principals, our leadership team, consists of:

• Eliot Levinson—CEO
• Rick Rozzelle—former CIO, Charlotte-Mecklenberg North Carolina Schools
• Charles Garten—Executive Director Education Technology Services, Poway, Calif.
• Brenda Barker—Executive Director, Technology, Wake County, N.C.
• Kenneth Eastwood—Superintendent, Oswego, N.Y.
• Ann Boyle—Assistant Superintendent, Curriculum, Scottsdale, Ariz.
• Steve Finch—CIO, Oklahoma City Public Schools

WHY WE DEVELOPED THE CIO TIME SHARE SERVICE? If you can't afford $105,000 and benefits for a CIO who will likely leave your organization after 13 months, can you afford $1,500 or $2,000 a month for someone who is knowledgeable about your district and available on a just-in-time, just-enough basis, and will save you enough money to pay for the service. That's what a CIO timeshare is.

Technology is now central to everything that happens in a school system, from instruction and buses to parent communication and financial management. We're concerned that the 86 percent of American school systems with less than 5,000 students will become second class instructionally and administratively, because they won't be able to effectively manage technology. Good technology staff is hard to find and expensive. Most vendors pay attention to the top 1 percent of school systems that have 20 percent of the students, because it isn't worth their while to work with small school systems. Intermediate units have the same knowledge and staffing problems as the school systems. We developed the CIO-Time Share Service to provide a cost-effective way for intermediate units and small school systems to get the strategic technology support they need.

WHAT IS THE CIO-TIME SHARE SERVICE? The service supplements the technology capability of smaller school systems so that they can remain high-quality instructional institutions. The CIO-Time Share Service is to technology what your outside lawyer and accountant are to contracts and finances: it supplements your internal capability with external expertise. Main service components include:

• An audit plan. How well are you using technology and budgets and implementation for the future?
• An annual implementation plan. A quarterly plan for technology tasks.
• E-rate review. Are you getting enough money? Are you doing the forms right? How much money should you get? Have you covered everything?
• RFPs. For strategic systems purchases.
• Review of contracts. Are your contracts getting you what you need?
• Vendor Management. Overseeing your technology vendors.
• Access to databases on instructional and administrative systems.
• Regional seminars for superintendents.
• Discounts from collaborative buying of hardware and software.
• SuperTECH NEWS newsletter.

If there is anything more you wish to know about the CIO-Time Share Service or the BLE GROUP, please e-mail or call:

Eliot Levinson <eliot@blegroup.com>, CEO,
THE BLE GROUP
703.437.0482

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THE NEW ESEA and TECHNOLOGY

The new "No Child Left Behind" ESEA Act has great import for your technology use:

• The law emphasizes accountability and annual testing. This will accelerate school systems, implementing internet-based instructional management systems. These systems combine curriculum planning, the delivery of instructional materials linked to state standards, and ongoing normative- and standards-based testing. These systems make the written curriculum, the taught curriculum and the tested curriculum the same rather than very different as they are now. There are a growing number of these systems on the market (see: INSTRUCTIONAL MANAGERS article below).
• The establishment of block grants allows broad latitude on the funding of technology. The $700 million technology grants previously included in the Technology Literacy Challenge Grant, Technology Innovation Challenge Grant and other technology funds are now being distributed directly to states and localities. The rules for the distribution are:
  • Half of the funds must be distributed to all school systems based on the percentage of Title I students in the district
  • The state must set priorities and distribute the other 50% based on competitive grants among all school systems in the state

Twenty-five percent of the money must be spent on technology-related staff development. In other words, the new funding system maintains a Title I bias, but is more flexible than the previous funding system, allowing states to set their own priorities for half the funds while school systems do as they wish with the remainder (e.g. use it for training, paying fees for Web-based applications, hardware, and even outsourcing technology management on services like CIO-Time Share). THE NEW LAW WILL ALLOW SCHOOL SYSTEMS TO PAY FOR THE FULL COST OF CIO TIME SHARE AND OTHER MANAGEMENT AND OUTSOURCING SERVICES.

Transferability: School systems can transfer technology money to use for other purposes and also transfer other ESEA funds for technology use.

Bottom line: Districts will have local authority in how they spread their technology dollars and most districts will have at least $15,000 to spend on the technology issue of their choice.

Visit the U.S. Department of Education's Web site for specific educational technology funding information.

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INSTRUCTIONAL MANAGERS AND THE ACCOUNTABILITY SOLUTION
The new ESEA and state standards and testing requirements will encourage school systems to use instructional managers. These applications integrate the three parts of the instructional process: the written curriculum, the taught curriculum and tested curriculum. Before Web-based systems, these were available only on print-based materials and were poorly connected. The district's written curriculum usually became shelf-ware. These new Web-based systems enable quality standards-based instruction and testing. Within the next three years, each of the country's 16,253 school systems will have an instructional manager.

The instructional managers provide the following:

• Planning. Sequencing curriculum and skills for each grade and subject.
• Instructional Delivery. Having instructional material from one or a variety of publishers linked to standards and delivered to student or teacher desktops.
• Assessment. Providing standards-based and norm-referenced testing that can be done on an ongoing basis to determine the effectiveness of the curriculum.
• Management Information. Providing information on what standards are being taught and what is being learned at the student, teacher, school and district level for each classroom, grade and subject.

What you need to know to buy a Web-based instructional manager. We are in the early stage of Web-based instructional management products. Before you buy, do your research as the products are new and changing rapidly. Here are some of the issues:

• Most of the products are only partial solutions. They offere one or two of the three functions, i.e. curriculum planning, delivery, or assessment—but not all three as of yet. You should choose based on your own priorities.
• These are not cheap tools. These are fee-based systems with annual fees normally ranging from $10-20 per student, with an average of $12 per student. The pricing is often hard to understand because of extra costs for training, curriculum alignment etc.
• Many of the instructional managers are good at being desktop versions of teacher plan books. Unfortunately, they often ask school systems to fill up the system with local curriculum. This is fine if you have a good curriculum, but if your schools have poor test scores, it doesn't make sense. Look for managers with high-quality instructional materials.
• Some of the systems are Web-based tools, while others remain server-based. Look at a Web-based system. The difference is that with a Web-based system someone else runs the hardware, and with a server-based system you have to buy and manage the servers. In the long run, Web-based systems will cut your costs and avoid hardware maintenance problems.

Name Brands. In keeping with our intention to provide concise, helpful information for decision making, below is a list of instructional managers with brief descriptions. The list is only a small portion of what is out there and the list is rapidly expanding.

Click here to view the BLE GROUP POWERPOINT presentation on The State of Instructional Managers.

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OSWEGO SCHOOLS
Dr. Kenneth Eastwood, Superintendent

Oswego City Schools is a 6,000-student system in upstate New York. It is one of the national leaders in the use of technology for instruction. Over the last five years, the district has developed a high-quality, Web-based instructional resources and assessment program, an outstanding staff development program, and a proven method for integrating technology into instruction and funding technology. Go to their Web site <www.oswego.org> —it's worth a thorough study. Looking at Oswego's efforts should be helpful to other medium-size school districts just beginning to integrate technology into their operations. The following are some nuggets of wisdom from Oswego.

1. Use of technology to support standards based instruction. Courses show teachers how to align social studies, language arts, math and science to state standards and to formulate both constructed response and document-based questions through the use of a standards database that Oswego maintains for the New York standards.

2. Support of teachers in instruction. Strong staff development means technology in-service courses that have online tutorials and/or supplementary materials. An extensive list of course titles includes: Basic Internet; Internet Searching; Microsoft Word, Excel etc.; Internet Classroom, Power Searching, Internet English 7-12; Internet Science 7-12 and more. Visit Oswego's In-Service Courses Page or see its Staff Courses Brochure

3. Approach to funding. The district commits 2 percent of its budget to support technology each year. This investment allows Oswego schools to replace 15 to 20 percent of its equipment annually, thereby preventing obsolescence. In addition, the district has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from private sources and vendors through donations and in-kind services.

E-mail: <keastwood@oswego.org>
Web site: <http://www.oswego.org/ocsd-web/welcome.htm>

Also visit BLE GROUP OSWEGO PAGES at http://www.blegroup.com/casestudies/case-oswego30a.htm

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HELEN McCRACKEN: Curriculum Director—Canon McMillan School District Canonsburg Pennsylvania

Canon McMillan is a 4,000 student, middle-income school system in Western Pennsylvania. Canon McMillan has been able to do well on state testing despite, the broad range of students it has in its schools.

Helen McCracken is a veteran educator with 15 years of experience as a teacher and principal before becoming the director of curriculum. With the need to address state testing, the rapid turnover of teachers and the importance of critical areas like early literacy, Dr. McCracken has been looking for a system to manage the instructional process and to address accountability at the teacher, school and district level. McCracken also is interested in a system that will align high quality instructional materials to Pennsylvania state standards, provide teachers with support, and place emphasis on standards-based teaching and learning.

McCracken is a very knowledgeable educator but is new to the world of technology. Over the last two months, Dr. McCracken has worked collaboratively with the BLE GROUP to find an appropriate instructional management system for Canon McMillan. She has managed the process internally and made decisions on specifications for the system. The BLE GROUP has supported the Canon McMillan effort by writing the RFP, inviting appropriate vendors to apply,and overseeing the product demonstrations. The BLE GROUP has worked with Dr. McCracken, and the technology director Bill Strauch to write contracts and determine technical specifications for the system. At this point Dr. McCracken is in the final stages of choosing an instructional manager and working with the BLE GROUP to plan an implementation process. McCracken's and Strauch's needs are similar to those of curriculum and technology directors in small school systems. The CIO-Time Share Service has supported them so that they are able to make and implement strategic technology decisions rapidly.

E-mail: hmcracken@cmsd.org
Or call: 724.745.9030
Or visit: The BLE GROUP <www.blegroup.com>

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Below is an annotated list of technology-related education conferences (complete with links) that you may wish to attend in the next few months.

AASA
Buses and bleachers mixed with financial systems and instructional managers. Good meeting but not predominantly technology.
American Association of School Administrators
February 16-18
San Diego, Ca.
www.aasa.org

COSN
Best meeting on state-level technology policy and activity. State and local CIOs deal with issues like accountability, E-rate and total cost of ownership.
Consortium for School Networking
February 27-28
Washington, D.C.
www.aasa.org

FETC 2002
Largest display of education technology products; worth it for the product display.
Florida Educational Technology Conference
March 6-8
Orlando, Fla.
www.fetc.org/fetc2002/index.html

Superintendent's Technology Summit
Small conference good for in-depth conversation with other administrators on technology management issues. Good place to network; not strong on product.
eSchoolNews
March 10-12
Austin, Tex.
www.eschoolnews.com/conferences

ASCD's 57th Annual Conference & Exhibit Show
Great for instructionally interested people. There is a terrific display of technology-based instructional applications.
March 9-11
San Antonio, Texas
www.ascd.org/trainingopportunities/conferences/2002ac/2002ac.html

NSBA's 62nd Annual Conference & Exposition
Some technology; predominantly a general meeting for school board members.
April 6-9
New Orleans
www.nsba.org/conference/

The Conversation: The Education Domain
World-class intimate-atmosphere meeting of CIOs, CTOs, state and municipal education executives and senior IT industry executives.
Converge Magazine
April 18-19
Cambridge, Mass.
www.convergemag.com/events

The Leadership Institute
Accountability issues for administrators and school tech leaders from data mining to high stakes tests.
Technology and Learning
May 2002
New York City
www.techlearning.com/events

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SUBSCRIBE TO FUTURE ISSUES
If you would like to receive future issues of SuperTECH NEWS, please send us a quick email at eliot@blegroup.com. If you would like us to send the newsletter to any of your colleagues, please let us know or feel free to forward this issue on.

Let us know if the SuperTECH NEWS newsletter is helpful to you and what you would like to read about in future newsletters. Let us know if there are good practices and people we should write about……. Call us if you want to know more about the CIO-Time Share Service.

E-MAIL: eliot@blegroup.com
OR CALL: 703.437.0481

BLE GROUP
1039 Sterling Rd., Suit 104
Herndon, Va, 20170
703.437.0482 phone
703.437.0485 fax
THE BLE GROUP www.blegroup.com

SUPERTECH NEWS © 2003 BLE GROUP. All rights Reserved. Do not copy or reproduce without written permission.