Executive Director's Report: The T+L Conference: A true cost-benefit winner

The 2005 T+L², attracting more than 2,100 teachers, administrators, technology coordinators, instructional leaders, and school board members -- plus 229 companies and organizations in the Exhibit Hall -- was spectacular!

The companies that exhibit at the world’s coolest trade show truly appreciate the quality of the attendees, I learned, as I roamed the hall. This conference is smaller than some others, but attendees get to have personal interaction with the companies that are exhibiting. One exhibitor told me he has made appointments with school districts for every day until Dec. 15, and at that time, the conference still had a half-day to go.

What makes this conference so important for exhibitors? It’s because we promote the team approach. We discount the registration fee for multiple attendees from a school district.

We believe that this conference is so rich in programming  -- and so important to the future of public education -- that a group of people from a district who attend the conference as a team can make better recommendations for program, software, or hardware changes for its district than one person or even two people.

I also talked to attendees, who told me the same thing. “At this conference, vs. NECC [the National Education Computing Conference], for example, I feel that I can network with other district staff, go to a session or two and actually run into them to compare notes at one of the general sessions, receptions, or on the exhibit floor,” one attendee says. “I will never miss this conference. It is my learning lab for the year.”

My favorite story is from Superintendent Stephen W. Hefner of the Richland Two School District in Columbia, S.C., who addressed attendees after winning a Technology Leadership Network Salute Award.

“It was 10 years ago that our local school board members and I traveled to Atlanta to attend our first T+L Conference,” Hefner told the attendees. “Prior to attending that conference, we viewed our districts as being a really good district, but we knew we had to improve our technology efforts in our classrooms.”

“Once we arrived at the conference, it didn’t take very long for all of us to realize just how far behind we were,” he continues. District leaders were “simultaneously humbled -- and inspired” and found they were “at the back of the pack in terms of technology integration.”

“And so upon returning to our district, we together made the commitment to integrate high-quality technologies with every aspect of the educational process,” he says.

Among the innovations adopted in Richland Two are one-to-one computing classes, a 2.3-1 student-to-computer ratio, wireless mobile computing, virtual online classes, data warehousing, and streaming digital video-on-demand delivered to all classrooms via a fiber-optic wide area network.

“Today, 10 years later, with strategic commitments by our school board and investments by our local community, we are now among the leaders of the pack,” Hefner says.

I wish every reader of School Board News will watch the five-minute video that captures the quality and excellence of the teaching and learning in the Richland Two School District.

This year, I also heard from a few attendees about why their district sent only two or three people to this year’s conference instead of a larger team. One registrant told me, “Our budgets have been really hurt by the increased gas prices, and we’ve had to cut back on staff professional development this year.”

When I heard this, I sympathized, of course, because I know how tough these decisions are, and we appreciate that the district could at least send a couple of people.

But I also thought the district’s leadership was shortsighted because of the immense savings and benefits that can accrue to schools that purchase the right program, software, or hardware and whose teachers and administrators receive the hands-on training available right there at the conference. (On the exhibit floor, the larger vendors actually host hourly classroom-style workshops.)

Just do the math: One school district spent less than $1,000 a person to send a team of eight people to the T+L² Conference, including registration, airfare, and hotel. (They cut some costs by doubling up in four rooms and attending many of the sponsored luncheons and receptions.)

While at the conference, the team figured out that by using a particular program (I can’t tell you which one because the other companies would cry favoritism), they could save almost double the cost of purchasing that program in staff time alone.

The program they purchased, an automatic instant communications system, will save hundreds, if not thousands, of person-hours. They will be able to use this system, not only to notify parents about snow days or parent-teacher conferences, but to inform them of immediate evacuations or security lockdowns. Teachers can even use the system for homework reminders.

The budgeting implications -- and the communications and community relations advantages -- are huge. The investment in this one program paid for itself many times over.

A principal from a rural K-12 school told me about an online experiential learning program he learned about at a workshop. He thought the program would be engaging and invigorating for high school students -- and would help reduce his school’s dropout rate. He knew that a major factor contributing to this problem is students’ boredom and their perception that school is irrelevant to the real world.

What is the cost/benefit of this program? It’s hard to tell. However, the cost of educating a teen in his high school is $5,500, compared to the average national cost of $30,000 a year to maintain an incarcerated youth.

So am I bullish on the T+L² Conference? You bet. Is it a cutting-edge meeting serving those districts that have understood how technology, when incorporated seamlessly into teaching, learning, and administrative practice, can find real solutions to demanding problems? Yes. Is it a meeting that serves urban as well as rural communities? Most definitely, yes.

Two weeks after the conference, I traveled to the National Rural Education Association for its annual meeting, where half of the programming was on technology. These rural school leaders have figured it out: Technology is a big part of the answer for rural educators. Without it, they are limited to a very small world, with few options and few resources.

With technology, they can have distance learning, virtual schools, collaboration with higher education, experiential learning, one-to-one learning, AP classes, and International Baccalaureate programs. With technology, they can open up the world to their students -- and all that the 21st century has to offer -- with huge cost savings. Could we all learn something from rural educators? You bet.

Okay, bottom line, technology is not the silver bullet. But it is more like the air we breathe.

As “technology visionary” John Seely Brown says: “Today’s kids think of information and communications as something akin to oxygen. They expect it. It’s what they breathe It’s how they live. They use technology to meet, play, date, and learn. It’s an integral part of their social life. It’s how they acknowledge each other and form personal identities.”