LoTP Part IV Using WebJunction's TechAtlas

Dreama Deskins, of DKD Consulting, demonstrates the use of WebJunction's tool for doing technology planning. Those who are getting e-rate discounts are required to have a technology plan (unless getting discounts for just POTS / Plain Old Telephone Service) and this is a handy tool for putting together such a plan.

The steps are: envision, assess, inventory, budget, and evaluate.

There are samples of visions and goals; a questionnaire to help you assess your needs, and other tools to make the tech planning process much easier. The assessment tools, based on your responses to the questionnaire, creates potential objectives for you. You can then review those objectives and delete those that you don't think are relevant, or edit the objective--at which point it suggests activities, lets you assign the activities to someone, set up e-mails to remind them of the activity and when it is to be finished.

The inventory section provides tools to do the inventory. Even if you don't know all the answers, it's a good list of things you *should* have answers to, so you can use it as a worksheet.

Not necessarily related to the technology plan itself, the inventory section also provides an event tracker so you can log problems and solutions you tried that worked and didn't work.

In the budget section you:

• configure setup options for your technology plan budget
• establish the years covered by the plan
• select a budgeting level
• set objectives to flesh out your technology plan
• fill out the budget worksheet

In the end, it creates a tech plan for you, which you can download as a Word doc. This looks to me like the way tech plans should be done, but seldom are.