CIO Summit Highlights

On September 22nd and 23rd, 40 senior-level technology directors from school districts across the country converged in Trenton, NJ, at the invitation of Tech & Learning for our inaugural SchoolCIO Summit. Their mission: to discuss, debate, and create a document that lays out what it means to manage a 21st-century school district.

They accomplished these goals and then some. The following pages are a distillation of four working groups that hashed out strategies over two days. The working groups categorized these issues under four distinct umbrellas: assessment, infrastructure, content, and students.

The conversations were thought provoking and lively. The insights gleaned were many and varied, so much so that they don’t all fit in print. More details and highlights, including video interviews as well as participant presentations, can be found in our online vault at schoolcio.com.

CIO guests began the Summit with a private tour of The Barracks Museum on the site of the famous Battle of Trenton, from the Revolutionary War. Dinner followed with a keynote talk by David Warlick.I’d like to thank all of the executives who took their time and smarts to contribute to this event, as well as our keynote speakers David Warlick and Jeff Mao. I’d also like to especially thank Judy Salpeter, our grande dame of events coordination, who went to great lengths to ensure a productive and sophisticated couple of days. As always Diana Milbert and Jared Stearns provided the intricate logistics needed to herd dozens of CIOs (and you thought cats were bad!). Our editorial team of Christine Weiser and Ellen Ullman also rose to the occasion.

One final note of appreciation goes to the folks at EdRoom, who facilitated the online discussion amongst our participants before the face-to-face event. Many of the excerpts here were pulled directly from transcripts they generated. You can see their technology in action at http://www.edroom.net/.