School Improvement
Pathways to School Improvement NCREL's award winning site designed primarily to help school improvement teams as they progress through the phases of the School Improvement Cycle.

Education Leadership Toolkit Subtitled "Change and Technology in America's Schools," the National School Boards' Association's toolkit provides extensive resources for planning, policy, curriculum, assessment, evaluating one's leadership style, developing teams, planning and evaluating professional development. It includes sections addressing the questions "Why change?" and "Why technology?"

National Study of School Evaluation Excerpt: NSSE's current scope of work includes a comprehensive series of publications and services to support data-driven and research-based school improvement planning.

Quality School Portfolio (QSP) Two free software applications that offer schools a solution for collecting and storing student data that can best inform their practices. The Data Manager is a database program built exclusively for schools that enables users to import, disaggregate and report on data. The Resource Kit consists of 21 research tools in the form of surveys, questionnaires and observation protocols that can help schools gather data about areas of their climate and instructional practices.

NWEA’s Growth Research Database The Northwest Evaluation Association is developing a longitudinal data warehouse of information from schools across the country. Called the Growth Research Database (GRD), this resource will contain assessment data that measures individual student achievement accurately and does so frequently enough to capture student growth over time. The NWEA plan is to collect longitudinal growth data from hundreds of thousands of students in order to enable in-depth data analysis.

Education Issues The Education Commission of the States (ECS) provides extensive resources on current education issues. Pull down from the "All Issues" menu bar to select a specific issue.

ASCD's Educational Leadership Selected articles from Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development's publications.

National Center for Technology Planning NCTP is a clearinghouse for the exchange of many types of information related to technology planning, has announced a new focus on technology auditing.

Learning with Technology Profile Tool "is a computer program intended to help educators think carefully about their practice in the areas of engaged learning and technology. The program presents indicators of engaged learning and indicators of technology. For each indicator there are three choices that educators can compare to their own practice. When finished, educators can view the results in a graphical format to help identify their strengths and weaknesses."

Policy Overview
Consortium for School Networking "promotes the use of information technologies and the Internet in K-12 education to improve learning. Our members represent school districts, state and local education agencies, nonprofits, companies and individuals who share our vision."

CoSN's Safeguarding the Wired Schoolhouse helps school leaders understand the issues involved in managing Internet content, and to build on the extensive work that the school community has already done to create positive online experiences for children.

Digital Divide: At a Glance describes the gap between individuals and communities with greater and lesser access to technology resources and training. Bridging the Divide is critical because: Digital media can engage students who lose interest in traditional schooling; All people are entitled to take part in the new information-based economy; In this Digital Age, employers require workers with technology skills.

Resource Management
Total Cost of Ownership: CoSN's "Taking TCO to the Classroom" project helps school leaders understand the long-term costs involved in building and operating a network of computers so they can budget adequately to achieve their technology goals.

Involved Communities (Edutopia, George Lucas Education Foundation) Businesses, universities, community organizations and parent groups can contribute resources and expertise as partners with teachers and students. The community can become the classroom. This site highlights such creative partnerships, where technology connects classrooms to the larger world.

Baldrige In Education The Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence provide a systems perspective for modeling effective organizational management and performance excellence. An education version of the criteria was created in the mid-1990s as a framework for understanding and improving school performance and student learning.

Resources selected by Ferdi Serim and compiled by Janet Murray for Information Technology for Learning: No School Left Behind (Big6 Associates, 2003) November, 2002. Last updated: June 6, 2003 .