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Budgeting for the Effective Use of Education
Technology
How much have you really spent on technology? How does your
spending compare with national benchmarks? What hidden costs
are most likely to stage a surprise attack on your budget?
Mass Networks Education Partnership, in collaboration with
the national Consortium for
School Networking (CoSN), offers one-day workshops for
education leaders that will prepare them to apply TCO planning
insights. Superintendents, business officers, technology directors,
school board members and other people responsible for preparing
school budgets will benefit the most from this program.
Participants will:
- Identify major components of TCO and discuss how they
apply to K-12.
- Share experiences and lessons learned with other district
leaders.
- Become better able to budget for short- and long-term
technology costs.
- Take home customizable cost analysis
tools as a starting point for improved budgeting.
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"This information has helped me understand how much we're really spending on tech support"
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Learn to analyze past expenditures and predict future costs
as you integrate technology into the overall budget. Discover
how to save money without sacrificing technology's usefulness.
This workshop is especially suited for business managers,
tech. directors and assistant superintendents.
Technology is a Powerful Tool
It amplifies and transforms. It can boost administrative
efficiency, contribute to professional growth and, most important,
increase student learning outcomes.
It is also very expensive. Even worse, the field is changing
so rapidly that most school leaders are unable to accurately
anticipate the life-cycle usage costs of their technology
investment. So we keep getting caught by surprise when the
"hidden costs" of technology suddenly hit us across
the bottom line.
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"I think that with budgets tightening it is important
to look at the big picture in terms of cost of ownership."
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Through our work with districts we frequently hear stories
about the difficulty of budgeting for technology. Schools
constantly run into unexpected expenses. There is an over-reliance
on "one time windfalls" that often can't be used
to pay for fundamental costs such as staff training, curriculum
integration specialists, tech support, and equipment upgrades.
People simply don't have meaningful financial benchmarks
to measure themselves against or to use as guides for future
planning. And few people have been at this long enough to
be aware of all the possible strategies for keeping long-term
costs under control.
What we need is the ability to forecast the Total Cost of
Ownership (TCO) of technology:
- To have an overview of the full range of obvious and often
"hidden" potential spending needs
- Tools to help calculate how much each will cost
- Strategies to keeping their TCO under control
To schedule a TCO workshop, contact David Mordecai at
dmordecai@massnetworks.org
or (617) 783-9988 x111.
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