Student Online Personal Information Protection Act or SOPIPA recently took effect in California and New Hampshire. This law was created to help fill gaps that are currently in place with attempts to protect student data. However, even though SOPIPA is in place that doesn’t mean that student data is being thoroughly protected. The first steps that I would take is first to expose teachers that there is a law. I would make this either a mandatory training. Currently, in our district there is a mandatory training that HR makes each person in the district complete. The training can be completed online at your own pace. After the training there is a short quiz to prove completion of the training.
I believe we need to be more cognizant about what it is we are sharing with all of our staff members. If we are providing PD on how to use a digital program, we must also include information on how to make sure we are safely handling student data. We no longer can hold the information solely in the hands of IT departments, but yet those that hold that info must be able to share with admin or other district personnel the importance of getting that information out to teachers and staff.
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This week we had the choice of investigating further an initiative and how that initiative is being used in our district. I have to say so far this has been my favorite assignment. I loved a, having a choice in what I wanted to investigate and b how we presented the information changed things up a bit. Even though several other people chose the same topic I learned quite a bit from each of the presentations. I choose to investigate further NGSS, or New Generation Science Standards. One of the follow up questions to my presentation is how can we move to a data system that “tracks” for a lack of a better word how these standards are being taught. I could easily see the badging system in place as a checks in balance with student learning. However, from my point of view there are still several layers that need to be in place for this to happen for both teachers and students to both be successful in the classroom. Teachers need to be confident they know the content, the standards, and then technology. I know many districts are trying to teach all three at the same time but no matter how we look at it, we need to continually provide a lot of professional development, and collaboration time for our teachers. Which brings us back to the point of how important it is to have as many stakeholders in the important conversations as there can be. Also, there needs to be a constant reflection of what the current reality of what the business architecture looks like and where the district wants to head. Once that is laid out backwards planning of exactly how that will happen, by whom and by when is extremely crucial for success to truly happen. Before starting Module 3 I felt very overwhelmed thinking about putting together all of the information from my district. While the task was still very overwhelming I started to see gaps within the district. The hard part is I know everyone in each of their perspective departments works really hard and believe in what they do. Yet, what was so glaring is the work of every department overlaps into another department in some way. Some of the overlap is financial, some is serving students but no matter the overlap the need for a successful business architecture plan is crucial. I would say my district tries has improved greatly in ensuring the overlap does not create too many wasted resources but I can also see where some leaders have transitioned has left gaps and or a need to implement a better system. For example, in my department we have had four different directors within the last four years. Each of those directors worked tirelessly to improve the needs of our English learners. However, each of those directors also implemented new systems and much of the systems were different from the previous director. All of these changes take time to adjust and learn, which we all know time is money. I know there is not a perfect system and with each new director there will be new procedures implemented but creating future changes on a system that is as strong as it can be can eliminate unnecessary waste. This week we took a look at each of the departments within the district to identify their purpose, who it was that was a part of the department, key points that represent the department, budgetary items linking to that department and finally how they align with the mission of the school district. Overall this was a very eye opening assignment considering I thought I knew a lot about my district.
The most difficult part of the assignment was to see exactly how much money is spent in that department. For example, when looking at the budget classified individuals include bus drivers as well as human relations personal. These are both two different subgroups within my chart. The budget is not broken up between cost on maintenance of transportation vs. personal used to drive the buses. I found this across many aspects of every department. When discussing curriculum that uses technology does that fall under technology as a tool or a program? The technology department is a very large department that includes technicians as well as support staff in implementing blended learning. On the other hand there are also personnel that are used in technology that are not certificated and do not work with directly with students, yet are vital in making sure all of the programs run effectively throughout the district. I think overall the biggest lesson that I learned is that when looking at a district such as Vista Unified there are many, many overlapping responsibilities within each department. Due to this, how can we know for sure each personnel or item purchased is essential to running an effective educational setting so that expenditures are not being used ineffectively? When looking at our technology plan I can see that the plan has been created to be efficient and productive. However, when looking at many of our facilities I do not see quite the same care and detail being given. With that said, I was impressed with how business services lives within almost each department. Hopefully this means that the right hand is continually talking to the left hand when making decisions on how and where money is being spent and if it is truly necessary or if we are continually overspending because of lack of conversation. Finally, I was very impressed with the support and systems set up within my district. I am not in a position to say if we are using our budget effectively and efficiently but we truly are on the road to becoming the model of educational excellence! |
KellyI like people. I love their stories even more. Archives
April 2016
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