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The primary purpose of this study was to determine what factors influence the integration of educational technology as perceived by Texas teachers. The secondary purpose was to examine the relationships between the determinant factors. This study answered the following questions: 1) Are there significant differences in teachers’ perception of school technology and readiness across grade level and subject area? 2) Are there significant differences in teacher-principal technology readiness congruence across school percentage of economically disadvantaged students? 3) How do teachers’ perceived levels of technology readiness predict student mastery of Technology Applications (TA) TEKS? To address the research questions quantitative procedures were followed to investigate whether significant relationships existed among dependent variables, school technology and readiness, and teacher-principal school technology and readiness congruence, and the independent variables (a) grade level, (b) subject area, and (c) percentage of economically disadvantaged students. Data analysis indicated significant differences in teacher school technology and readiness perceptions by grade level and subject area, and significant differences in teacher-principal school technology and readiness congruence by school percentage of economically disadvantaged students. Using path analysis a theorized Texas School Technology and Readiness Effects Model was validated. The findings were that (a) teachers in higher grade levels and more technical subject areas perceived their school technology and readiness at significantly higher levels; (b) as the percentage of economically disadvantaged student increased in a school, teachers perceived their school technology readiness at lower levels and were less congruent between their perceived school technology and readiness and their principals’ ratings of the teachers’ school technology and readiness; and (c) Leadership Administration and Instructional Support, followed by Infrastructure for Technology, Educator Preparation and Development, and Instruction Practice were the main drivers for student mastery of Technology Applications (TA) related Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS). / text

The importance of integrating technology across the curriculum has been prominent in educational literature for the past decade. Numerous obstacles have been identified and documented surrounding the successful integration of technology in public schools. Access to hardware, appropriate software, professional training for educators, technical and financial support to sustain meaningful uses of technology in schools are the primary areas to be addressed when designing a comprehensive information technology implementation strategy for educational environments. The obstacles are clear, but many educational leaders have failed to develop a model which successfully addresses the challenge of integrating the use of technology as a tool for teaching and learning and as a means of constructing new knowledge for and by students. This paper will explore how technology facilitates learning through inquiry and how inquiry supports a constructivist/constructionist approach to teaching and learning for students and professional staff. This will lead to an examination of how inquiry and constructivism advance the integration of technology in education and how it provides a venue for developing communities of inquiry in schools. A framework for two initiatives developed for Yukon schools will be presented which address many of the challenges common to the successful integration of technology in public schools today. Both initiatives, the Computer Resource Teacher Model (CRTM) and Technology Learning Communities (TLC), promote integrative and constructive uses of technology through an inquiry-based approach to teaching and learning with computers.

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<p> The purpose of this study was to identify and prioritize a list of implementation risk factors and suggested mitigation measures for the development team of the California Community Colleges (CCC) Online Education Initiative (OEI) to improve the probability of successful implementation. This study led to the development of an authoritative and comprehensive prioritized list of risk factors and user-recommended mitigation strategies for the risks of a large-scale shared learning management system (LMS) implementation. The data collected and the conclusions derived from surveying college administrators and faculty are intended to augment the literature as well as advance the understanding of how to successfully implement a new shared LMS of this scale successfully. The participants in the policy Delphi study were 10 administrators, 10 full-time faculty members, and 7 adjunct faculty members from the cohort of the first colleges accepted to adopt the OEI. Two rounds of questionnaires were administered using the online electronic survey program SurveyMonkey. The first round asked participants to prioritize software implementation risk factors and make mitigation suggestions for the highest priority risks. The second round asked participants to rank the mitigation suggestions for the top 10 risks identified in the first round. Only 2 of the top 10 risk factors were statistically significant: underfunding of maintenance and support, and lack of faculty and staff responsibility, ownership, and buy-in for the project. There were no statistically significant differences in risk factor assessments based on job type, length of time in job, legacy LMS, legacy LMS experience, or size of college. OEI leadership and colleges should evaluate and implement the top mitigation suggestions for at least the first 2 risk factors and preferably all of the top 10. Engaging the early adopters in assessing potential implementation risks, prioritizing them, brainstorming mitigation measures, and prioritizing those measures yielded an actionable list the team can use to reduce implementation risks and improve the probability of success of the new OEI system.</p>

<p> Prior research has explored many facets of innovation, provided models of governance maturity, and analyzed the impact of corporate decision-making on innovation. However, there is little research on IT governance maturity in higher education or on IT innovation in organizations outside of the IT industry. Findings from previous research were ambiguous regarding whether a mature IT governance process helps or hinders innovation. This study fills a gap in existing knowledge by reviewing the literature and examining the interaction of IT governance and information technology innovation at five major U.S. universities. It provides insights into the structures and processes necessary for IT governance to facilitate technology innovation and the factors required for effective IT governance in higher education. </p><p> Highly effective IT governance processes focused on collaboration and communication were associated with greater integration of radical innovation into institutional processes than effective IT governance processes that focused primarily on the prioritization of large enterprise projects. Incremental technology innovations were pervasive among all schools studied. IT governance was found to be more effective under a delegated model of decision-making authority that empowers IT governance bodies than under a CIO-centric model. The inclusion of a faculty, students and business units in IT governance committees was associated with a stronger innovation culture.</p>

<p> Today's economy is driven by information technology (IT). Education and business should come to an agreement that functional technology skills should be integrated with core academic courses to create an educational system that truly prepares workers for the 21st Century. The business realm theoretical foundation for this study laid on the match/mismatch established between technology&mdash;math education and business' readiness&mdash;[math] skills. The level of education and skills of workers needed by business and industry has increased. Nonetheless, scholars underlined the belief that the skills workers possess are generally not sufficient for the demands of the more sophisticated jobs in today's economy. With this study this researcher pretended to fill the gap in the literature by examining the hypothesis that poor education results in low skills is hampering U.S. businesses and the disparity between what employers need and what workers offer is getting serious enough. Within this investigation the researcher tested for first time three theories: the AST/TML theory, the TAM theory, and the Constructivist theory, whereas having behind scenes K-12's mathematics arena. This study found that "there is no statistically significant relationship between the degree to which teachers accept new technologies and technology usage in mathematics instruction" and that "teachers' individual affective reactions to technology toward integrating computers and technology into math instruction are not related to readiness skills." However, a Post Hoc analysis demonstrated that at least for one of the individual predictors, problem solving construct scores, the null hypothesis was rejected. It means in a long path to academic success, small waves of effectiveness in education are penetrating the sandy beaches of skills. Additionally, this researcher confirmed some scholars' assertion about Confirmatory Factor Analysis, which described that sample sizes smaller than 100 as dangerous and recommended using sample sizes larger than 200 for safe conclusions. Finally, the researcher tested and validated the Technology-Mediated Learning (TML) theory while adding his research positive conclusion(s) to the body of knowledge.</p>

This dissertation addresses issues related to teaching and learning middle-school mathematical graphing concepts and provides an in-depth analysis on the impact of introducing a new assistive technology in a visually impaired classroom. The motivation, design, implementation, and deployment of the Graph and Number line Input and Exploration (GNIE) software, an auditory graphing tool that enables students with visual impairment to navigate and interact with a coordinate plane or number line graph is presented. Results include a discussion about how a computer-based auditory graphing software can be a beneficial supplement to aiding teachers and students with vision impairment with middle-school based graphing principles. This work also demonstrates that auditory graphing software support collaboration between students of different levels of vision loss and that bone-conduction headphones can be used with software to perform concurrent think aloud protocols without degradation of qualitative data.

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