To ensure the success of a 1:1 or BYOD program, schools must have a plan in place for ensuring teachers understand how to successfully integrate technology into their classrooms. Teachers are expected to be competent in this area, but what exactly does this mean and what does it look like?

It is the responsibility of administrators to determine these two things — and to do that they must become well versed in educational technology themselves.

As the lead learners in their schools, principals have an obligation to not only model effective use of technology but to thoroughly understand what technology integration looks like so they can articulate it to their teachers. On Saturday morning, Kyle Pace and Steven Anderson addressed this topic in their Exploring the 4 C's for Administrators workshop.

It is more important than ever for administrators to familiarize themselves with the ISTE Standards. The presentation focused on the standards for administrators, which include visionary leadership, building and sustaining a digital age learning culture, establishing and promoting excellence in professional practice, continuous systemic improvement, and modeling digital citizenship.

Steven Anderson

Pace and Anderson shared numerous tools and personal experiences about how they help administrators gain a better understanding of how to curate, create, communicate and collaborate — as well as why it is important to do these things. Some of the resources they shared are linked below. Both teachers and administrators will find them valuable.

I highly recommend starting with Twitter and Diigo. Twitter allows you to quickly connect and share with people from all over the world. Many teachers who regularly use Twitter will tell you that, hands down, it is the best place to learn new things. If you aren't ready to commit to creating a Twitter account, you can simply go to search.twitter.com and search for resources by entering a hashtag. Jerry Blumengarten has collected a massive list of educational hashtags over the years.

Diigo is a social bookmarking service that allows you to save bookmarks to the cloud so you can access them as long as you are connected to the web. Diigo allows users to organize their bookmarks either by tagging them or putting them on lists. Here is more information about getting started with Diigo.

Curation resources

• Diigo list example
• Educlipper
• Evernote

Creation resources

• TPACK
• VoiceThread library of educational examples
• Google Drive/Docs
• Richard Byrne's Guide to Google Drive/Docs
• Google Docs for Administrators: 5 Ideas to Get Started
• Screencast-O-Matic

Communication resources

• Remind
• Google EDU Hangouts on Air
• EdWeb
• The Educators' PLN

Browse the complete list of resources.

Beth Still is the innovative teaching and learning specialist for Gering Public Schools in Gering, Nebraska, and has been an active member of ISTE since 2008. Learn more on her About.me page and follow her on Twitter via @BethStill.