The people in charge of improving the use of technology in schools face daunting challenges, and their needs are likely to become even more complicated in the years ahead. Think cybersecurity threats, lean budgets, data isolated in silos, and demands for improved professional development. Making progress in all five of those areas is going to take hard work, collaboration, patience, and time—and there will likely be setbacks along the way. District IT leaders, in particular, see urgent needs ahead: In a survey conducted by the Consortium for School Networking, those administrators named cybersecurity as their top priority.
In this special report, Education Week explores all five challenges and how ed-tech leaders are responding to them. The report includes an examination of those hurdles as seen through the experiences of five different district ed-tech leaders; an analysis of the skills that effective chief technology officers need, beyond technical expertise; a CTO’s take on building digital literacy, moving to the cloud, and using analytics to improve student outcomes; and a superintendent’s perspective on digital content use, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity strategies, and the expansion of makerspaces.