Abstract
The interaction between schools and technology forges the school leaders to transform their practices to support 21st century paradigm skills. Schools have the complicated mission of incorporating technologies to enhance effective management practices in their schools. A project known as FATIH was launched to enhance the opportunities and to improve technology in schools in Turkey. This project aimed to establish interactive boards in classrooms to make the learning environment more effective in schools. In the first and expanded pilot phase, 49000 tablet PCs have been distributed to both students and teachers in 81 provinces in Turkey. The tablets and interactive boards have been delivered to 150 high schools of the total 1704 in Izmir Province. The school administrators and teachers who delivered the project have had a technological preparation course during the implementation of the pilot project. A quasi-experimental quantitative study was used as a research design to determine school administrators’ views of technology leadership preparedness and to investigate the impact of this technological preparation course. The technological leadership survey developed by HacıfazlıoÄŸlu et al. (2011) from ISTE, 2009 International Society for Technology in Education, standards for administrator was used and 618 principals and vice principals were surveyed in Ä°zmir during the second term of 2013/2014 educational year. Descriptive statistics and a one-way multivariate analysis of variance were applied to analyze the data. The findings revealed that the high school administrators’ highest perceptions of technology leadership preparedness were in subscale of visionary leadership whereas the subscale digital citizenship had the lowest mean score. There was a statistically significant difference of technology leadership preparedness perceptions between the high school administrators who delivered the technology preparation course and non-course participants, where the course participants perceived higher levels of preparedness on all five subscales of visionary leadership, digital age learning culture, excellence in professional practice, systemic improvement and digital citizenship. Key words: Technology leadership, visionary leadership, digital age learning culture, excellence in professional practice, systemic improvement and digital citizenship.
Highlights
Educational leadership in this era was faced with strategic decisions for dealing with the competition and recruiting students
We argue that technology leadership has multiple dimensions given the complexity of schools as learning organizations (Flanagan and Jacobsen, 2003)
Many of today’s administrators are novice technology users and have very little experience necessary to be effective technology leaders (Redish and Chan, 2007; Riedl et al, 1998). This quasi-experimental study was guided by the main question: “What is the perceived technology leadership preparedness level of school administrators on the 2009 ISTE NETS-A standards?” and the following sub-question was “How do technology leadership preparedness perceptions differ between principals who attended the technology preparation course and those who did not”
Summary
Educational leadership in this era was faced with strategic decisions for dealing with the competition and recruiting students. Creating a globalized environment in which educational leaders are faced with more competition, but with competition from outside of their own localities. Schools have changed from relatively closed systems in which one leader was responsible and accountable for producing predetermined outcomes, to dynamic systems that must adopt and respond to rapid societal changes on a global level (Franciosi, 2012). This kind of technological leadership is a key element in management processes necessary for guiding today’s teachers and students of the 21st century. Studies of school improvement point to the importance of principals’ leadership in such efforts (Fullan, 2001; Fullan and Stiegelbauer, 1991; Louis, 1994)
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