Developing your digital technologies action plan

This guide offers three templates to help you frame up your strategic thinking around digital technologies in your school and to compile the information you're going to need to produce a compelling action plan.

The first of these templates is this roadmap worksheet. Now this is an interactive PDF, so that you can download your own copy and write directly into the text boxes, or you can download a copy and photocopy it off, and have people write on it as they're going through their discussions. It has the eight planning strands that are part of our guide and each is colour-coded, and if you click on one of these links, it takes you directly to that section of the guide. You can look at the key principles, what is involved in this particular aspect, and there are some reflective questions there that you can measure your progress against. As well as that, we have provided these focus questions just to help you guide your discussions with your team and with your stakeholders.

Now we suggest you start with your neighbours and blockers. Just a nice open conversation around, firstly, what's going well with digital technologies in our school. And then, what are the things that are causing us a little bit of concern: some of the blockers that are preventing good progress.

Next we suggest you come across and look at these three here: the Purposeful Curriculum, the Powerful Pedagogy, and the Innovative Learning Environments. Because those three set the context in which digital technologies are going to operate in your school. It's this environment here, that digital technologies need to serve.

After that, it doesn't matter too much which order you do these in, just be conscientious about clicking on that link, going back and having a look in the guide, and seeing what it is that is required to be successful in these areas.

As you're having these discussions, you're going to come up with actions and goals that you realise need to be in your thinking as you move forward. So it's really important in this section here, Emerging Goals and Actions, you record these as you are working through your consultation and through your discussions. Just so that they don't get lost as you gather all of the information.

The next template is a Roadmap Discussion Summary. The intention here is if you've gathered lots of information, if you've had the discussions, now you need to capture the essence of that so that other people can read what you've been doing and what you've been finding. The first section of this summary looks again at those key context areas of Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Innovative Learning Environment. What it suggests you do, is capture the school-wide principles around each of those areas, and then, from all your research and your discussions, summarise what are they key points in terms of how digital technologies will contribute to the school-wide goals.

For the remaining five planning strand areas, we're suggesting a slightly different approach. Probably better to look at it in terms of what were the positives, the enablers, and then what were the concerns, and the blockers, for each of those strands. It's just a nice way of looking, of summarising the context and understanding the challenges and the possibilities that you have.

Finally, you need to fill in this section at the bottom, which is around prioritising those actions and goals that you've been recording during all your other discussions. We are suggesting three strategies. There are those that are immediate items, things that can be done quickly and cheaply but will make a difference - runs on the board. Then we have those pressing issues. They are often more complex, more expensive, but you know that if you don't do them, if you don't address the issue, then it's disrupting learning, and it's causing problems in terms of your momentum with digital technologies. Then there are those longer term goals. They are often around more substantial pieces of work where you're going to have to spend time planning, gathering the information and gathering the resources. So they are identified as things you will work on over twelve to twenty-four months.

The final template really spells out our goals and our actions. This is where we're going to identify exactly what the goal is that we want to achieve. We think about what it is going to look like when we're successful in achieving that goal, what are the actions that are going to be required, and then the logistical things like, who's responsible, what are the resources that are required, do we have the funding allocated, and what's the timeframe in which we need to do that. And we need to complete that sheet for each of the key goals that we've been identifying.

So finally, now that you've completed those two templates, if you put them together, there it is: you've got a really concise, and compelling, digital technologies action plan ready to share with your community.