Computer coordinators as change agents: some New Zealand observations.

Strong and effective leadership at the school level is needed if information and communication technology (ICT) is to be successfully planned and integrated into the school curriculum. A study was conducted in 2000 to investigate factors affecting the use of technology in 25 secondary schools in one region of New Zealand. As part of the study, the leadership role of the ICT coordinators in the planning and implementation process has been examined. This article discusses some of the observations on the leadership role of the ICT coordinators gathered from that study. In this article the authors argue that ICT coordinators could serve as agents of change as they are the ones who could provide professional development for their colleagues. They could also be the driver of technology development. However, ICT coordinators currently face heavy workloads and lack the time necessary to successfully envision themselves and their schools. They could play a more effective role if their role is fully recognized and more resources are given to them.

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In the last few years there has been a great increase in the availability of computer hardware and software and in the Internet access available in schools in New Zealand and overseas (Market Data Retrieval, 1999; Information Technology Advisory Group, 2000). With more computers being available to teachers and an increase in Internet connectivity in schools, we would expect a greater use of ICT in teaching. However, as Cuban (1999) observed, classroom use of ICT has continued to be "uneven, slow, and of decidedly mixed variety."

One popular explanation for the lack of the use of ICT in schools is the lack of systematic planning and implementation. While this is a plausible explanation, Cuban (1999) suggested that cultural and social beliefs, as well as school and organizational structures would also impact on whether or not teachers are willing to innovate with computing technologies. To help change the beliefs and values of teachers in technology use, a strong and effective leadership at the school level (as contrasted to the national level) is needed (Lai, 1999). When we talk about school leadership we sometimes only focus on the role of the principal as the one who could envision their staff. For example, in New Zealand, workshops such as Principals-Only Days were routinely organized for principals for such purposes. In the school setting, there are other leaders, who may not have the same level of power or authority as the principal, but nonetheless could be as influential and envisioning as the principal. The ICT coordinators, f or example, could serve as school reform or change agents (Marcovitz, 2000).

A study was conducted in 2000 to investigate factors affecting the use of technology in 25 secondary schools in one region of New Zealand. As part of the study, the role of the ICT coordinators in the planning and implementation process has been examined. This article discusses some of the observations on the leadership role of the ICT coordinators gathered from that study.

THE STUDY

In 2000 a study was undertaken to evaluate the effectiveness of technology use of 25 secondary schools in southern New Zealand who had received some two million dollars of funding from a local community Trust to purchase computer hardware and peripherals, networking items, and cabling for their schools (known as the Technology Project). These 25 schools were located within an urban population area of about 115,000, as well as in several small provincial towns and also included a number of small rural schools. The region is a relatively low population area and some of the schools in the study were located at distances of up to three hours drive from the main urban centre. The schools in the study ranged in size from 115 to over 800 students, and were both coeducational and single sex. Schools in the region overall fitted a quite narrow economic profile. On a decile scale of 1 (the lowest) to 10 (the highest), these schools ranged from decile 5 to decile 10.

A total of 700 questionnaires were administered to principals, ICT coordinators, members of boards of trustees, teachers, and junior students. For the purpose of this article, data gathered from the 25 principals and 25 ICT coordinators are used. The response rates for the principals and ICT coordinators were 76% (19) and 72% (18), respectively. In the follow-up interviews, three principals and seven ICT coordinators from eight schools were interviewed.

Who Were These Technology Coordinators?

In New Zealand, secondary schools very rarely have a full time ICT coordinator with responsibilities for technology. Coordinating technology is usually a responsibility added to an existing position. In our study of 25 secondary schools, for example, ICT coordinators were either deputy or assistant principals (28%) or department heads of ICT, mathematics, or technology (61%). Only two of the ICT coordinators in this study had no teaching responsibilities. One was a network manager, while the other was a member of senior management and the Director of Religious Studies in addition to being ICT coordinator.

Most of the ICT coordinators were male (78%) and three of the four female ICT coordinators were at girls' schools, with the remaining one at a coeducational school. These ICT coordinators were all very experienced teachers, with an average of over 20 years of teaching experience.

In this project ICT coordinators have reportedly engaged in a range of tasks over and above their normal teaching and or school management duties, which may include all or some combinations of the following:

* managing networks, purchasing equipment, maintaining equipment; keeping up to date with new innovations in the field, deciding future directions for their schools;

* working in consultation with and leading staff technology purchase and professional development groups.

* organising and offering inschool professional development workshops and seminars, mentoring other teachers, team teaching with other teachers;

* providing pedagogical support for use of ICT in their schools, envisioning and leading staff; and

* presenting conferences and leading staff development sessions in other schools.

ICT coordinators on the whole are experienced teachers in positions of responsibility within the school. They also tend to have responsibility for the purchase, maintenance, and support of ICT equipment, as well as for teaching others how to use it. As a group, they appear to be in a good position to act as agents of change in terms of the integration of ICT.

LEADERSHIP ROLE OF ICT COORDINATORS

As Planner and Manager

The leadership role has to be clearly recognized when technology is to be implemented in schools. What makes a school technologically successful depends a lot on the kind of leadership in the process. In our study, the ICT coordinators had a high level of involvement in the planning and management of the purchase of large amounts of technology hardware in the participating schools, with 83% of them involved in planning and 89% in managing the project. The funding agency of this Technology Project required schools to submit a technology plan before funding could be used. Just over three-quarters of the ICT coordinators were involved in writing the applications (76.5%) and overseeing the implementation of the project.

Eight of the 25 schools involved in the Technology Project were studied in more depth and in each of these schools a driver in the planning and implementation process could be identified. In four schools, the "driver" of the project was in a senior management position while three were Heads of Departments of Computing or ICT, while in only one case school the leader was the principal.

Although not necessarily the driver of the project, the ICT coordinators had a great influence in formulating ICT related policies in schools. The role and consequently the focus of the ICT coordinator in each of these schools appears to have been pivotal in the way ICT implementation has occurred within the school. The roles of ICT coordinators appear to fall into two quite distinct categories each one supporting different philosophies of learning. There are those that are driven by technologically driven decision-making and those who are oriented toward educational needs decision-making. In this research, the majority of schools were in the first category.

School A was the school most oriented towards educational needs decision making for ICT inclusion of the schools, "As far as IT across the curriculum goes we have changed our support from being a technical whiz, who can fix insides of computers...to less technical people like me and L... who have got much better teacher support skills."

In this school there were two teachers who serve as part-time curriculum coordinators (5 hours for one and 15 hours for the other) to assist other teachers for technology integration into the curriculum. One of the teachers explained her role as follows:

Organising training days, I'm setting up a little grid which is looking where we're doing cross-curricular across the subject areas, to see ... where we're strong. Helping teachers write their cross curricular things. I've written up a lot of skill sheets. I'll help them write work sheets. I'll go into the classroom and be a support person while they're teaching. I'll even go and take their lesson for them. I stood in the other day for an English one who was doing desktop publishing and how you can set it up so it can be a magazine etc.

In this school highly technical support is sourced from a commercial firm on an as needed basis.

As Envisioner

All the schools in this study were required to come up with a technology plan. Having a technology plan, however, does not mean that schools have a clear vision, which could be translated into action. As mentioned previously, schools fell into two categories, those that are driven by technologically driven decision-making and those who are oriented toward educational needs decision making, and the technology plans reflected this.

In this study ICT coordinators were teachers who had a deeper understanding of how computer technology should be used in schools. They were usually early technology adopters and have used technology both at home and in school (e.g., using the Internet for communication). They also rated themselves as having a higher level of technology adoption in their teaching. To measure the levels of technology adoption, a six-stage model proposed by Knezek and Christensen (1999) was used to measure their level of technology adoption. These six stages include (a) awareness; (b) learning the process; (c) understanding and application of the process; (d) familiarity and confidence; (e) adaptation to other contexts; and (f) creative application to new context. From Table 1 we can see that ICT coordinators had rated themselves at a much higher level of technology adoption than the other groups. ICT coordinators were able to adapt ICT to other contexts within their subjects. In contrasts, most teachers were only at the stage o f being familiar and confident with using the technology for their classes.

It should be noted, however, that ICT coordinators tended to teach computing so their focus was often on how to best teach computer skills. Even in cases where ICT coordinators did have a vision of whole school integration it tended to be general rather than to have appropriate uses for each subject. For teachers to effectively integrate ICT into the curriculum, or even for them to want to do so, they must first have some understanding of the role and benefits ICT can have for their particular subject. Teachers have different levels of understanding of the process of technology integration and there is a need for them to be envisioned in terms of their own subject areas.

With a deeper understanding of the technology adoption process, several ICT coordinators in this study took up the challenge of envisioning the staff. One ICT coordinator commented that this was one of his hardest tasks.

...developing the overall vision. That's probably been the thing which I find physically the hardest actually. You can sit down and come up with what you want, get into the plan and the vision for this school but then bringing everyone along side...that's probably the hardest thing.

It has been seen that teachers are at very different levels of technology adoption from the ICT coordinators. It was also observed that basic beliefs between technology using teachers (serious users) and ordinary teachers were very different. For example, there were obvious differences in the perceptions of the impact of technology in education between ICT coordinators, technology using, and nontechnology using teachers. Table 2 shows the percentages of these three groups of respondents responding positively when asked about their perceptions of the impact of technology on both the quality and efficiency of curriculum delivery.

From this table it can be seen that the majority of technology using teachers and ICT coordinators believed that ICT was improving the quality and efficiency of curriculum delivery, while fewer than half the nontechnology using teachers believed the ICT was having a positive impact. It appears, generally, that those teachers who do not use the technology do not believe it has a positive impact. To envision teachers effectively, it will first be necessary for these teachers to use the technology. One way to enable teachers to use technology is through providing training in first using, and then integrating, ICT.

As Trainers

In the Technology Project we noted that schools used a variety of ways to provide professional development to their staff. The most effective and common way, as we have observed, was inschool professional development, usually provided by the ICT coordinator. The following is a typical comment: "I am in charge of professional development and run lots of courses for my peers--mostly after school, but recently five courses before school in the morning."

Although schools did make use of external consultants, very often the ICT coordinators were the ones who planned and provided professional development for their colleagues. There were some problems associated with this. As mentioned previously, ICT coordinators tended to be early adopters of technology and they often underestimated the kind of training that was required, as well as the time it would take for other staff members to learn the necessary skills. They also did not always recognise the need to encourage others to learn how to use technology. Also, teachers who do not use technology tend not to believe it has a positive impact. A number of ICT coordinators recognised this problem, using a variety of ways of dealing with them. The following is a comment by one of the ICT coordinators:

...and so I think it's whatever we have to do to make it appealing for them to use and if they go through a play phase, then that initial enthusiasm soon bums off and they actually get down to using them as tools. But if they are never, never allowed to go through that play phase, without too many restrictions, apart from sort of ethical ones, then, then you don't reap the benefits in the long term.

As Technician 

For teachers to gain experience in using ICT, it is important that the equipment is working. In some schools a great deal of this maintenance and repair work fell on the shoulders of the ICT coordinator. In most schools the coordinators were required to be a technical whiz as well as the visionary in the school, as well as the provider of school-based professional development and staff support.

My role is to decide what new equipment will be purchased in the school, if there is any physical alteration to the buildings that needs to be done. If there is any cabling to be laid, if there's software to be purchased that is used by the whole school. I'm also responsible for the long term plans of where computing's going in the school. I also do some minor technician's work, the printer doesn't go, come and fix it ...and a little bit of on the spot professional development. I also maintain the network, I collect all the e-mail, I help to maintain the schools website although I don't write it myself.

OBSTACLES TO EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP

From the study we note a number of obstacles that have reduced the effectiveness of the ICT coordinator as leader in the school.

Workload Issues

As the job of being an ICT coordinator was usually added on top of their regular responsibilities, very limited time or no time at all has been made available for these additional tasks on top of required teaching or administrative workloads in several schools where the ICT coordinator was interviewed. Many of these ICT coordinators found their position of balancing the technical aspects of the job with teaching was quite difficult. The following two comments illustrated how difficult it was:

Time. I probably get a couple of hours a week. I do the timetable as well so I can build that in to whatever time I want. But still I am a silly person and like teaching kids, so, I don't grab too many non-contacts.

Ideally I'd like most probably a bit more time. You know, you know, I think I'm at the stage where most probably I've got sufficient expertise that I can most probably umm. If given time I can sort of do what I wanted to. But I haven't actually got the time to physically do umm a lot of the things which I'd like to do which uses ICT.

Very often these ICT coordinators had to spend the time to deal with students abusing various aspects of network systems. Several network managers considered this to be frustrating and time consuming. One ICT coordinator commented:

What I have more trouble with and what takes me more time, is the kid who has a little knowledge and tries things and does some damage or wrecks it for other kids...That would be my biggest job. It's almost tail-chasing stuff. You just get one little bush fire put Out here and you've spoken to that kid about putting their own software on the system and how they signed a form they weren't going to do that sort of stuff and then the next kid pops up and they've done the same thing. That has become more time consuming.

The Need for Technical Support

As stated previously, in many schools, the ICT coordinators also served as the technicians. Having technical support could substantially change the role of the ICT coordinator to one where integrating technologies with teaching and learning becomes the core work of the ICT coordinator, rather than keeping current equipment working. This is the case in School A where support staff are employed to give curriculum rather than technical support. When asked whether technical support changed the role of the ICT coordinator one ICT coordinator replied,

Yes. I don't want to know about service. I'm not in the least bit interested in service. There's far more excitement in all of this other stuff. And I am a teacher and not a wire head. I don't pretend to be, I don't want to be, I've got no interest in being a wire head, but I am interested in good teaching techniques and effective teaching techniques, that's my job. Quite clearly, yep.

Balancing the role of being a teacher with maintaining the technical aspects of a network was also a problem. "But at the same time I don't really want to become a network specialist. That's not my job. It's a defacto job. I'm doing it because, well most of the time I quite enjoy doing it."

However, many schools found that hiring a person to be a purely technical support person was not always ideal, as such people were not teachers and therefore not as good at the curriculum support that many on a school staff needed.

Well, he was here most of the time, but he was on call. It was hard to get to do what you wanted him to do, he tended to do what he wanted to do. They're not a teaching person so they don't understand the teaching bits and they're not as good at the teacher support, especially now that we're moving into curriculum based support, whereas I'm a teacher, [my colleague] is a primary trained teacher. So we're better at the teaching aspect, and that support aspect and the integrating across the curriculum.

Schools in the study were encountering difficulties in finding people locally with the required skills to do such work on a part-time basis at relatively unattractive pay rates. One ICT coordinator of a school in a provincial town suggested that simply trying to find anyone at all in the provincial areas was very difficult. He suggested that people with the kind of skills that are most needed were working elsewhere for fulltime and better paid work.

It is sometimes not easy to get the right mix of skills that suited the type of work that was available in a school. One ICT coordinator commented that a difficulty of getting suitably capable people because schools' needs were not extensive and because of the simplistic nature of much of the work that was required. There were consequent issues in providing job satisfaction, career advancement and professional up-skilling for technical people working in schools. Another ICT coordinator explained the range of skills that a technical person might be expected to undertake in a school,

It's very hard to find the right person with the right mix of skills. One minute they've got to be solving network problems and the next minute they've got to spend a few hours cleaning mice and screens, and, that's very hard, to find a person who's going to want to do that.

Making use of a shared technician between a group of geographically close schools was one that several schools had tried but had also abandoned. Many technical problems required immediate action. Sharing a coordinator meant considerably more inflexibility than schools could afford.

Lack of Professional Development

An issue related to that of workload was the time needed to keep up to date with technological innovation. Rapid technological development in the IT field is endemic and chronic. One ICT coordinator stated, "probably the most frustrating thing is it all moves, the whole aspect of using ICT, it moves very fast. It's very hard for schools to keep up with the changes."

The lack of opportunity to gain networking knowledge and expertise to maintain the school network was quite an issue for some of these ICT coordinators. "I'd like a lot more [knowledge]. I can see a lot of potential for more collaborative work if I had a bit more knowledge of how it all works. I can set up users and give permission but its not detailed."

The difficulty of obtaining high level expertise to problem solve and assess systems that are under-performing was an issue for several ICT coordinators in the sample group. One ICT coordinator expressed the wish that what he "would like was somebody really, really talented, to have a look at:"

...whether or not the network is efficient, whether or not the speeds across different parts of the network are what they should be, whether the speeds on the Internet are right...when it takes eight minutes, [we measured it the other day], eight minutes to load a set of class data for Classroom Manager [a New Zealand designed administration and assessment package], you kind of suspect that there's something wrong somewhere. You know, eight minutes, on a Cat 5, something can't be right. So, I'd like to see that kind of analysis done to see whether or not we're actually doing it well.

In addition to the purely technical aspects of ICT, if ICT coordinators are to be whole school agents of change they also need professional development relating to school wide integration of ICT. Although they may have the technical knowledge, if ICT is to be successfully integrated they also have to understand how it is being used, and how it can be used, throughout the whole school.

TACKLING OBSTACLES TO EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP

The three major obstacles to effective leadership as reported in the previous section are very much inter-related. For example, the demand of the time for curriculum and technical support from teachers will be reduced if their expertise in ICT use has increased. This can be achieved by increasing the amount of professional development provided by external training agencies. As well, many secondary students have high levels of technical expertise and ways can be developed to use their expertise, before and after school, to provide technical support to both teachers and students. With added external and internal support, the ICT coordinator will have more time to assist teachers with innovative technology integration.

At present, very few New Zealand schools have a full time ICT coordinator position. To deal with the workload issue, it is perhaps high time for the government to recognize the important leadership role of the ICT coordinator, and establish such a position, ideally in both primary and secondary schools, but particularly in secondary schools. This should be a teaching position, and the person filling this position should have some technical background in information and communication technologies. However, having such a person does not mean that there is no need for schools to have a technician. It is quite clear from the research literature (Lai, 2001; Lai, Pratt, & Trewern, 2001) that both technical and curricular supports are essential if technology is to be meaningfully integrated into the school curriculum.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

In this article we have documented some observations on the role of the ICT coordinator as the leader in the implementation of ICT in 25 New Zealand schools. It is by no means a comprehensive study of the leadership issue. We argue that the ICT coordinator is the person who could play a major role in the planning and implementation of technology integration in the school. They could serve as agents of change as they are the ones who could provide professional development for their colleagues. They could also be the driver of technology development. However, there are a number of issues that must be faced before this can occur. ICT coordinators currently face heavy workloads and lack the time necessary to successfully envision themselves and their schools. ICT coordinators could play a more effective role if their role is fully recognized and more resources are given to them. Despite the problems, however, the ICT coordinator still remains the person in the best place to be the agent of change in terms of ICT integration as they are the ones who have the knowledge and the vision to integrate technology in the school curriculum. It must be noted, however, that the ICT coordinators in this study generally had responsibility for one curriculum area, often in ICT, and as such lack an overall picture of the needs of the different curriculum areas. This may be what is reflected in the technologically, rather than educationally, driven focus of the majority of the schools.

Table 1

Self-Rated Levels of Technology Adoption of Principals, ICT
Coordinators, and Teachers

                  Prior to the project  Since the project

Principals        3.31                  4.25 *
Teachers          3.71                  4.48 *
ICT coordinators  5.18                  5.82 *

* significant at the 0.05 level

Table 2

Perceptions of the Impact of Technology, Percentages

                                   ICT           Technology
                                   coordinators  using teachers

ICT is already making major
improvements to the quality of
curriculum delivery                89            86

ICT is aiready making major
improvements to the efficiency of
curriculum delivery                83            74

                                   Non-Technology
                                   using teachers

ICT is already making major
improvements to the quality of
curriculum delivery                48

ICT is aiready making major
improvements to the efficiency of
curriculum delivery                38

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Community Trust of Otago., The authors wish to thank Philip Munro and Nicky Elliot for their assistance. They also appreciate the helpful comments provided by the anonymous referee.

References

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Knezek, G., & Christensen, R. (1999). Stages of adoption for technology in education. Computers in New Zealand Schools, 11(3), 25-29.

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Lai, K.W. (2001). Professional development: Too little, too generic? In K.W. Lai, (Ed.). e-Learning: Teaching and professional development with the Internet (pp. 7-20). Dunedin: The University of Otago Press.

Lai, K.W., Pratt, K., & Trewern, A. (2001). Learning with technology: Evaluation of the Otago secondary schools technology project. Dunedin: The Community Trust of Otago.

Marcovitz, D. (2000). The roles of computer coordinators in supporting technology in schools. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 8(3), 259-273.

Market Data Retrieval (1999). Technology in Education, 1999 [Online]. Available: http://www.schooldata.com/prl8.htm