Education

Districts Making Tech. Progress, But Not Fast Enough, Survey Says

By Katie Ash — June 25, 2013 1 min read
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San Antonio

Although school districts report inching closer to meeting their overall technology goals, they have to make major improvements if they are going to achieve what they want anytime soon, according to the latest version of an annual survey published by the Software and Information Industry Association, released at ISTE today.

The report, called the Vision K-20 survey, is based on an analysis of questions posed to 1,500 educators between February and April. About 75 percent of the survey respondents were educators from the K-12 sector.

This year, SIIA added three new questions to its report pertaining to bring-your-own-device policies in schools.

The survey found that secondary and K-12 districts were more likely to embrace bring-your-own-device policies than elementary schools. The survey also found that about half of K-12 and postsecondary schools currently allow students to bring their own devices, and a majority of survey participants—60 percent—said they have already implemented or will be rolling out such policies over the next school year.

It is the sixth annual survey conducted by the SIIA, a trade association representing the software and digital content industry, including more than 200 member companies.

Survey responders ranked their progress in meeting various technology goals on 20 different benchmarks, ranging from having adequate security tools to protecting student data and privacy to having access to adequate bandwidth for communication, administrative, and instructional needs. The survey found that the results from those rankings were about the same as results from the 2012 and 2011 surveys.

As in previous years, the survey found that respondents from higher education said they were more likely to have implemented technology than those surveyed from K-12 were.

This year, that difference was even more pronounced than previous years. Only a small minority of survey participants—in both K-12 and higher education—reported their current level of technology integration as “high,” although most identified their goal as being to achieve a strong level of technology integration.

The SIIA team has also put together a new version of the survey that is in the process of being beta-tested (you can participate here), which aims to allow for more granularity in future iterations of the survey.

A version of this news article first appeared in the Digital Education blog.