Your District's Approach to Technology
Printer-friendly versionHow are technologies and technology solutions deployed in your district? Do you choose free open tools? Do you choose solutions that you secure and manage yourself? Do you have a provider that delivers a suite of technology solutions? Or do you make a choice based on the requirements at the time? You will want to deploy your Parent Portal in a way that works together with the technologies you have already deployed.
Start with your district’s technology plan, if you have one, to look for these answers. Your technology plan may be embedded in your district’s strategic plan and not as a separate document. What you are looking for is the roadmap of solutions your district is seeking to deploy in support of the learning goals you have established. Within that plan or in a separate more detailed document you will find a commentary that describes how technology solutions are designed and deployed.
In the absence of a plan, you can look at how technologies have previously been selected and deployed. Look at the information you gathered in the earlier sections of the Guide - Technology Tools in Your District and Technology Tools in Your School.
Districts tend to choose either proprietary or open-source solutions, and when they do they tend to choose them for most or all of their district technology solutions (choosing a single direction has the impact of corralling support costs as staff are not supporting multiple versions of the same type of product). In both cases, there are likely IT-savvy staff who can program, configure and operate the solutions, unless a service provider is tasked with providing the solution. Open tools are different than open source. Open tools are free technology platforms that can be used to support communities, and can act as a portal.
