Support Capacity
South Carolina Technology Plan Goal:
The South Carolina Department of Education (SCDE), school districts and individual schools will expand and support technology resources to assist educators and learners in meeting the state academic standards.
K–12 School Technology Initiative Efforts to Support the Goal:
The K–12 School Technology Initiative has a long history of helping districts acquire the hardware, software, connectivity and infrastructure to support educational applications, electronic resources and instructional technologies.
K–12 School Technology Initiative funds provide support of ETV’s Educational Technology Department (ET) – formerly Network Technical Services (NTS) – and are primarily responsible for supporting the program delivery needs of the state’s K–12 school community. This support includes the planning, installation and maintenance of all equipment necessary for the schools to receive television programming, regardless of the delivery method.
The Division of State Information Technology (State IT) is responsible for the administration of the federal E-rate program funds and the appropriated K-12 School Technology Initiative funds that provide network access to connect public schools and libraries with wide area networks (WANs). These networks meet local needs and connect each district and main library to the main South Carolina network, which links each to state resources and provides connectivity to the Internet. This support is essential for the implementation of online learning, enabling computer-based assessment and providing data and analysis tools to South Carolina schools.
As the technology needs of the educational system in South Carolina have grown, State IT has made changes in the design of WANs to take advantage of new telecommunications technologies that deliver more bandwidth to the schools and libraries. Statewide bandwidth requirements have grown substantially since the statewide network was created during the late 1990s.
In order to maintain some method of ensuring that the explosion of Internet bandwidth demand is truly serving educational needs in South Carolina, the K-12 School Technology Initiative Committee has approved the implementation of a new service offered by State IT to provide security and monitoring of the Internet bandwidth utilization. An additional aspect of the service provided by State IT is to assist school districts with the detection, prevention and handling of security breaches and/or virus attacks as most districts do not have sufficient resources to deal with this ever increasing threat on their own.
As an additional means to control the runaway cost associated with the explosion of bandwidth demand, State IT and the K-12 School Technology Initiative have developed an Internet policy to address specific requirements that must be met before appropriated or E-rate funds can be used to increase bandwidth. This policy is intended to provide equitable use of available funds to supply sufficient Internet access bandwidth to all districts, while still allowing those districts who have other funding available to expand their Internet bandwidth at the district’s expense.
K–12 School Technology Initiative funds will play a vital role in sustaining and refreshing South Carolina’s technology in order to maintain hardware, software, connectivity and infrastructure. Alarmingly, according to Education Week , South Carolina is one of many states with no plan or mechanism to regularly update technology as the point was made that technology must be regularly updated or replaced in order to remain an effective tool for learning.
In addition, the South Carolina Tech Think Committee convened in 2008 to examine the capacity that South Carolina’s schools must integrate technology into instruction and recommend the improvements needed to enable computerized testing. This report emphatically states that the most immediate need in the K-12 technology infrastructure is an increase in the broadband capacity and wireless access for student and teacher use. According to the Tech Think Committee, “the very backbone of technology in South Carolina schools – routers, switches, cabling and servers – need upgrading or replacement from the early state-provided system.” (2008). It is crucial that the State support the cost and renewal of the software utilized in schools and districts to provide instruction, meet reporting needs and support the daily functions of the education system.
In the area of student administration and data collection, South Carolina is one of only a handful of states to utilize a uniform student administrative system – SASIxp. K–12 School Technology Initiative funding allows use of SASIxp and provides funds that are imperative for training districts in the effective use and management of this data tool. South Carolina is on course to be one of the first states in the nation to implement systems that will enable local, state and federal government to make data-driven decisions through unique student identification and longitudinal data tracking.
K–12 Technology Initiative funding also provides technical professional development courses on SASIxp, which are needed to ensure accurate reporting from the districts in order to meet important federal reporting requirements such as Adequate Yearly Progress. Because of such funding, South Carolina was highlighted in Education Week’s Technology Counts as having state funding specifically allocated for educational technology.
Read the 2008 Progress Report of the South Carolina K-12 Technology Initiative. (You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view the report. If you do not have it, click here to download it for free.)