What Education Technology People Know About Curriculum and Why You Should Listen

I often find myself in meetings about curriculum projects. I am usually invited to either share my thoughts on the technology components or explain the technology options for tracking the curriculum. Sometimes the topic is sharing resources and making sure core documents can be managed and properly versioned. In all cases, I am required to have a broad overview of the K-12 curriculum. I am also required to have an understanding of the end-users and how they will apply the curriculum content to their various specialities.

Aside from two or three other people, I generally find I have the most objective overview of how things are connected and the areas that need the most support. In fact when I speak with anyone who is a technology coordinator or manager, I tend to have better curriculum discussions than when I speak to people working in more traditional roles.

The problem is because I am working within the department of technology, my opinions of curriculum topics are often politely disregarded.

All opinions aside concerning who may have the most objective outlook on curriculum, there is one fact that is nearly impossible to argue. As a technology coordinator or director I spend many hours working with data. I spend many hours managing the school’s data systems and creating reports. I spend countless time tweaking and adjusting information so it becomes useful to people who need to see one page summaries of thousands of data points.

Running algorithms and spreadsheet formulas to determine modal frequencies and trends in open responses is also a common practice in the life of an educational technology professional. Survey designs and survey data flow through my department and that data too is studied and reported. My department is the nerve center for  managing data and processing data.

Curriculum mapping is also a core aspect of educational technology. Curriculum mapping technology is not just something most educational technology professionals use, we are also often certified to train others how to use this type of technology to make accurate reports. Being trained to use technology to make reports, means that a person must understand the data and how to organise the data so that it is useful.

Those educational technology professionals who run integration or tech-coaching models are usually completely read in on the curriculum in their division (year groups and subject groups). They have actually read all the documents and plans. These people know who is doing what and when, and they have identified weaknesses that technology can help to strengthen. Clearly, they are more well versed on the curriculum compared to most other teachers.

But who is listening? Who is allowing educational technology professionals to help truly drive the curriculum with data analysis? Who is promoting the idea that the people who understand the end-game should be designing the game?

Here is a test. One of the most popular curriculum mapping tools is Atlas Rubicon. If your school uses this and you still have teachers make daily lesson plans in some form of text document or online web-form, then you are using Atlas Rubicon inappropriately. In Atlas Rubicon, on a single webpage, you can see what everyone is doing every week. Administrators using Atlas can have a weekly standards and alignment report, so that strange anomalies can be part of a weekly agenda. Weekly, so that students are not going through a bad process that is only discovered at the end of the semester.

And one more test. If a school’s analytics suggest more than 85% of the standards are being met, then those are probably wrong as well. The goal is not to hit the highest number, but to find the divergence where planning did not reflect the actual outcome. Posting high numbers usually means adjusting the plan but ignoring what the actual outcomes were.

If that last paragraph did not make sense, go find your educational technology people, because they can explain it and probably graph it.

Tony DePrato

tonydeprato.com