Infrastructure for Technology describes not only the equipment in place to utilize technology, but also the budget, staff, and support to maintain it. Our campus has a great ratio of students to computers (2:1) compared to most campuses, especially for being a DAEP campus. By encouraging the use of technology in the classroom and providing professional development on a regular basis, our campus has been afford the opportunity to use technology more than many alternative education campuses.
The entire state seems to be on the upswing in terms of technology. According to the Texas Long Range Plan for Technology and the state STaR charts, Early Technology campuses have decreased by .1% and now make up only 1.1% of schools overall. There is also a 1.5% decrease in schools listed as Developing Technology, bringing them to 30.4% of Texas schools. These statistics show that there have been increases in both the Advanced and Target Technology ranked schools in Texas. Advanced Technology schools now account for 61% and Target Technology for 7.6%.
For our campus to improve in this area, other classroom technology and distance learning would be the major issues to focus on. While we have done a very good job maintaining an infrastructure that puts us in the Advanced Technology category, we are doing extremely poorly in terms of other classroom technology. If we had a larger budget to allocate to this area, I believe we would see immediate improvement in both the STaR assessment and student achievement. As mentioned in the Texas Long Range Plan for Technology, some DAEP campuses are beginning to experiment with online courses for credit recovery. I believe using this method, once it has had a few years to become as efficient and effective as possible, would be an excellent addition to our curriculum in order to improve distance learning on our campus.
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