Education is a major part of the developed world. As nations seek to grow their economies, many invest to provide the best education possible. While teachers are crucial for ensuring success, education administrators do much of the work to handle the logistics and planning involved with delivering education to entire populations. While the demands have risen in recent years, technology can help make the task of being an education administrator a bit more tolerable. Here are five tech tips to consider.
1) Smart Phones
When most people think about smart phone apps, they think of games and other forms of entertainment. In reality, there are a number of apps that an educational administrator might find useful. Organizational tools can replace a PDA or desk calendar, and the communication these platforms enable is useful. In addition, smart phones provide a variety of GPS navigation tools that can help education administrators navigate to various schools and locations while avoiding traffic and congestion. By integrating a smart phone into their daily activities, an education administrator can make his or her job a bit more tolerable.
2) Email
While almost all education administrators now use email, many do not take full advantage of the platform. With some preparation, it is possible to set up email lists to contact different groups of people. It is possible to email fellow administrators at once, and an email list consisting of teachers can make it easier to send memos to all teachers. By carefully preparing these lists and modifying them over time, education administrators can save a considerable amount of effort that would otherwise be spent sending mail.
3) Social Media
With over one billion users, Facebook is now used by a majority of teachers and students at a school. While it is not sufficient for all tasks an education administrator must take advantage of, Facebook offers a number of tools to connect education administrators with their staff and students. By creating pages to easily share important information, school administrators can use social media to engage those using these popular social media platforms.
4) Website Development
One of the main job responsibilities of education administrators is delivering information. With the regulations and requirements that education employees must deal with, keeping all of the relevant information together can be a challenge. With a website, it is possible to give everyone a one-stop location to answer all of their questions. This can also reduce the printing costs of certain necessary documents. By integrating a mapping platform, websites can even deliver information about where particular events are held.
5) Tracking Software
Education administrators are often charged with overseeing the progress of teachers and students. Collecting and analyzing all of this data, however, can take a significant amount of time. By using sophisticated spreadsheets and other performance tracking programs, education administrators can significantly cut back on how long it takes to generate reports and analyses of performance. Further, these tools allow administrators to make run multiple analyses in a short period of time, which can lead to insight about how they can help teachers and students perform better.
Technology is a great tool, but it has to be used the right way to provide as much benefit as possible. By taking time to seek out the right tools and incorporating them into their day-to-day activities, education administrators can ensure that they are using technology as effectively as possible.
Jim Alexander is a school district administrator and guest author at www.topmastersineducation.com, a site with information about top-rated online masters in education degree programs.