Rural Education: Leadership in Technology- Survey Draft

This is a draft set of questions for a survey on the status of technology leadership in rural schools. This survey research is based on chapter 11, Rural Education: Leadership in Technology, in Leadership in Rural Schools, Technomics, 1998. The questions of this proposed survey seek to determine the depth of education and experience of educational leaders for making short and long term decisions related to the integration of new technologies into education. In the next phase of this development, these questions will eventually be turned into an online form page linked to an online database for collecting this information.

  1. Is your school building or district rural, suburban, urban?
  2. If working in a particular building, is it elementary, middle or high school?
  3. How many students are in your school and district?
  4. What is the nature of your current leadership position in rural schools: school board member, superintendent, principal, director, coordinator, assistant or associate, other.
  5. How many hours of formal training (e.g., workshop, conference presentations, course) have you received to date in the use of computers and the Internet?
  6. How many hours of formal training (e.g., workshop, conference presentations, course) have you received to date on the topic of methods and strategies for integrating computers and the Internet with curriculum and classroom practice?
  7. On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your confidence and comfort in dealing with the problems of technology integration?
  8. How frequently do you use a computer? on average, once an hour; once a day; once a week; once a month; never.
  9. Write the three most important problems or questions you face at this time in integrating education and new technologies such as computers and the Internet. Using a total of ten points, assign some part of your ten points to each of these concerns as a way of determining the relative importance of this question to you.
  10. Has your rural school moved beyond just one Internet connected computer and added a projection system so that the teacher can use the computer during whole class instruction? Or is this problem solved in some other way? If so, what rationale was successfully presented to funding sources and administrators to make this possible?
  11. In what ways does or should the school system provides education on tools and models of using the computer and the Internet to foster further economic development in rural regions? Are teachers being paid to use their information technology skills to nurture regional economic development during their summer months?

How can the above questions be improved? What other questions would be useful in determining the depth of this leadership capacity and designing activities for next steps in professional growth opportunities?

Send comments to Houghton@email.wcu.edu.

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