The gentleman featured on the cover of this magazine, John Q. Porter, is a symbol of the rising status of educational technology in today’s schools.
Porter, who has worked for several years to build technological capacity and know-how in the 140,000-student Montgomery County schools in Maryland, was recently named the superintendent of the Oklahoma City school district.
Moving up the career ladder from technology leader to the superintendency is relatively unusual. But Porter and others see it as a recognition of the skills necessary to manage the complexities of a school district, and a path that others are likely to follow.
To help you chart your own successful path in the world of educational technology, Editorial Projects in Education, the publisher of Education Week and Technology Counts, has launched Digital Directions. We have heard the message from ed. tech. leaders, time and again, that they need a publication whose sole purpose is to help them do their jobs better. We are sending this publication to a select group of 45,000 ed. tech. leaders like yourself from across the country.
Our aim is to meet your needs by making each successive issue more useful than the last one. That’s why we have included a reader review card in this inaugural issue. We not only value your feedback, we need it. You will help us determine what issues, problems, trends, or personalities would be worth covering in Digital Directions. So please fill out the review card or go to www.edweek.org/go/dig/ and tell us what you liked or did not like about this issue and what you would like to see in the future.
This first issue is designed to be chock full of useful and interesting stories and practical tips on a wide range of topics, including using technology to improve math and science education, navigating the ins and outs of wireless technologies, managing data-driven-decisionmaking initiatives, evaluating the quality of online courses, preparing for computer-based testing efforts, and more.
Reading these stories before they went to press reinforced for me the varied and sometimes perplexing ways that technology is affecting K-12 schools. Even though I have covered educational technology as a writer and editor at Education Week and other publications for more than a decade, discovering more about the changes and challenges in today’s ed. tech. world made me better appreciate the difficulties the professionals in the field face every day—and the opportunities they have to help advance American education.
