Being a Scholar-Centric Know-how Chief
For Michael Marassa, the important thing to working a superb expertise division at a faculty is making a tradition by which your group prioritizes the wants of others.
“Our job as expertise leaders is to essentially facilitate the needs and wishes of our academics, our directors, and our college students,” says the chief expertise officer at New Trier Excessive College District in Illinois. “It isn’t what’s finest for the expertise division.”
Marassa just lately obtained the Modern Chief Know-how Officer Award at Tech & Studying’s Innovative Leader awards (opens in new tab) in Illinois for serving to steer his district by means of this turbulent period in training with impactful use of expertise.
QR Codes and Clear Sound
Through the top of the pandemic, Marassa led two initiatives that helped earn recognition.
The primary was a QR-code based mostly well being screening and entry system for the complete district. Scholar and employees members had been recurrently examined for COVID utilizing a saliva check. They’d additionally take a well being screener every morning earlier than attending faculty to point they had been symptom-free. The outcomes of each this screener and check had been linked by means of an app to distinctive QR codes for every scholar and employees member. If somebody’s COVID check got here again optimistic, they’d be notified instantly. Within the occasion that they nonetheless confirmed as much as faculty after their QR code was scanned, they wouldn’t be admitted.
“It acquired to be fairly a classy logistic system nevertheless it was what labored and what we felt did our greatest to attenuate the virus entering into the constructing and serving to folks to really feel protected whereas returning to highschool,” Marassa says.
Secondly, Marassa helped the district put together for hybrid studying by putting in almost 200 classroom audio techniques to facilitate communication between academics and college students and distant learners. Right now, these techniques are nonetheless used to videoconference in distant presenters.
New Challenges Submit COVID
Whereas the QR-health screening system is a factor of the previous, many different features of college have modified for the reason that pandemic. Previous to March 2020, dad and mom didn’t obtain entry to the grade guide for his or her kids’s LMS and never each class even utilized an LMS. Now, Marassa says, “We actually have develop into unified in utilizing the identical studying administration system and likewise giving entry to our dad and mom.”
This variation got here after the district realized the have to be extra student- and parent-centric in its method, and to get higher at recognizing when college students are struggling.
“The scholars that we’ve at the moment, even with out COVID, are extra difficult and are dealing with all types of further stressors,” Marassa says. “So the extra info we’ve, the extra that completely different leaders of various features of a corporation can intervene earlier.”
Refresh and Talk
Marassa advises others working in IT to have a plan for refreshing the district’s tech. “Generally we’re reactive as an alternative of proactive,” he says. “I’ll use the examples of our houses. We now have all types of issues in our home that finally they’ll break, and we have to repair them. Like our air conditioner, our furnace, our fridge, our washer, and dryer.”
However ready till one thing goes fallacious doesn’t fly with edtech. “That sort of mindset, if you end up a CTO and also you’re managing a corporation the place there are such a lot of expertise techniques that have to run, it is simply not an appropriate apply,” he says. “Actually work on being a techniques thinker, and stepping again and taking a look at all features of your infrastructure, and in placing collectively a lifecycle plan you can work out financially together with your CFO and superintendent in order that they will plan financially to make it possible for your district stays dependable high-performing and safe.”
For expertise faculty leaders, communication with completely different stakeholder teams can also be important. “Firstly, with these folks which are on the bottom that work with you and for you as a pacesetter, you simply have to be engaged in relationship-building with them and attending to know them,” Marassa says. “As a result of they will actually make or break the tradition of your division. So it is actually vital that you simply set up these relationships, and make it clear together with your messaging, that you are a student-centric and a student-first sort of chief.”