How K–12 Schools Are Making Technology Work for Educators

If you ask Marlo Gaddis, board chair-elect of CoSN, IT and education should sit at the same table.

“People are realizing that working in silos doesn’t benefit students,” she says. A former elementary school teacher who went on to become CTO of the Wake County Public School System in North Carolina, Gaddis says she’s always believed in “cross-functional teams and solving problems with input from all stakeholders.”

Putting Teachers and Students First Breaks Down Tech Silos 

Jefferson County’s IT and education departments weren’t always on the same team, Pierce notes. Until about five years ago, JCPS maintained a standard IT team that worked out of the operations department, while a separate computer education group was part of the district’s academics division.

A Council of the Great City Schools audit led to the recommendation that JCPS bring IT and education under the same umbrella. Now, Pierce’s team includes several people he describes as “traditional tech professionals,” but it also includes three digital innovation specialists, all former classroom teachers and administrators.

“They work directly with the school principals to develop tech strategies and professional development plans so our teachers can be successful with digital tools and platforms,” he explains. Between that collaboration and the classroom support provided by the technology integration team, “we’ve been able to take our old silos down and put our students and teachers first.”

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One of IT3’s biggest success stories unfolded soon after the department was established, Pierce says. In a collaborative effort between teachers and IT, the group introduced Google Workspace for Education across the entire district.

“Now, Google has really become our unofficial centralized platform,” he says. The solution serves as the foundation for a popular digital program called the Journey to Success, formerly known as the JCPS Backpack of Success Skills. This program along with Google’s tools and services work in concert with creativity-focused platforms such as Adobe Express for Education.

“The idea is to have technology embedded in the curriculum, so that it’s not something that teachers have to do outside of their traditional day,” Pierce says. “For us, it’s about everyone working together.”

K–12 IT Leaders Must Understand the Educational Environment

While more than half of K–12 technology directors come to the profession with backgrounds in education according to a 2024 CoSN survey, relatively few teachers report having significant experience in IT.

Unfortunately, this difference has meant that classroom technology decisions are often made without real input from active instructors, according to a 2022 report from Clever. This has led to teachers who aren’t always happy or who struggle to use new digital tools effectively.

It’s a problem that many schools solve with go-between edtech specialists who lead technology selection and facilitate training.

However, Gaddis says that instructional technology and IT divisions “ideally belong in the same department.” And in school districts where they’re not, “they should be reading from the same playbook and in close collaboration with the academic team as a whole.”

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At WCPSS, her team was involved in everything from curriculum building to designing the district’s learning management system to ensure that it met the needs of students of all levels. They also worked carefully with school principals to make sure they had the technologies and skills they needed to be successful.

CoSN’s Certified Education Technology Leader program stresses how important it is for IT leaders to understand the educational environment, Gaddis notes. Those who earn the certification must demonstrate expertise in the organization’s Framework of Essential Skills of the K–12 CTO, a compilation of best practices in areas ranging from leadership and vision to technology support.

The framework, Gaddis says, highlights the fact “that we’re long past the time where our work was all about wires and switches.” Instead, “our work today is about the student, and we can be successful as long as we keep that at the heart of what we do.”

Constant Collaboration Between IT and Educators Equals Success

Another former educator turned IT professional is Jason Kelsall, learning systems strategist at St. Vrain Valley Schools in Colorado. The seventh-largest district in the state, St. Vrain serves more than 33,000 students across 60 schools and specialized programs.

Kelsall’s position falls within St. Vrain’s District Technology Services department, but his day-to-day work entails constant collaboration with several other divisions, including the department of assessment, curriculum and instruction. “Every decision we make on the technology team that’s related to any type of implementation, we’re hand in hand with the curriculum people,” he says.

The district has had a one-to-one student device program for the better part of a decade, Kelsall notes, and it’s now preparing to refresh its fleet of 34,000 tablets. Previously, ahead of the initial rollout, technology services created an instructional technology advisory committee. Members of the committee included representatives from the IT and curriculum departments, along with parents, teachers and others.

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Kelsall says the committee’s goal was not to discuss makes or models of devices but to instead zero in on what educators hoped to see students doing in the classroom. “It was, ‘What should teaching and learning look like?’” he explains. “Then, we looked at which technologies would provide that experience for our teachers and students.”

Collaboration will again be critical for the upcoming refresh, Kelsall says. System administrators will be leveraging device management tools to check out old devices and prepare new ones for distribution, and teachers will work with technology site coordinators to streamline the trade-in process. In the end, they plan to ensure that the swap goes smoothly and relatively quickly, he says, “and the payoff will be that students and schools can get back to teaching and learning and having fun.”