Future Ready Learning

The district routinely evaluates the user experience of the openly licensed resources.
Follow-up efforts will encourage the district’s most innovative teachers to remix or
contribute original openly licensed learning resources, leveraging the Illinois Shared
Learning Environment OER tool set to do so.
Partner With Other Organizations
Partnership options for securing resources include local businesses and other organizations,
alumni, internal and nearby teacher experts to provide professional development, and curriculum
development arrangements with other districts. Some school districts have formed partnerships
with local and county governments, sharing technology infrastructure and technical staff
to keep costs down by jointly funding chief technology officer roles and taking advantage of
the economies of scale when building and purchasing broadband access together. These economies
of scale also can be realized through consortium purchasing such as the Kentucky Valley
Educational Cooperative, which represents several districts and higher education institutions at
once and helps decide issues of resource allocation.
Make Full Use of Federal Funds
The E-rate program provides substantial price discounts for infrastructure costs for schools and
public libraries and is one source of technology funding. In addition, for funding beyond connectivity,
a U.S. Department of Education Dear Colleague letter, published in November 2014,
provides guidance and examples for leveraging existing federal funds for technology-related
expenditures.
USING FEDERAL FUNDS: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION DEAR COLLEAGUE
LETTER ON ACCEPTABLE USES OF FEDERAL FUNDING FOR TECHNOLOGY
The purpose of the Dear Colleague letter prepared by the U.S. Department of
Education in November 2014 was to help state, district, and eligible partnership
grantees better understand how they may be able to use their federal grant funds to
support innovative technology-based strategies to personalize learning. The letter
includes examples of how funds from the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
(Titles I, II, and III) and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) may support
the use of technology to improve instruction and student outcomes. Examples were
limited to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and IDEA because of the
scale of these programs, but funds from many other formula and competitive grant
programs that are administered by the U.S. Department of Education also may be used
for this purpose.
The examples do not depart from previous U.S. Department of Education guidance
but rather clarify opportunities to use federal grant funds to support digital learning,
including improving and personalizing professional learning and other supports for
educators, increasing access to high-quality digital content and resources for students,
facilitating educator collaboration and communication, and providing devices for
students to access digital learning resources. Funding these four areas is important
because technology itself is not a panacea.
OFFICE OF Educational Technology
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