Planning your school’s digital journey
The Digital Maturity Planner (DMP) is a tool that helps schools understand their current level of digital maturity, identify gaps, and help build and manage a plan that lifts their digital capabilities.
Co-designed with schools, it will assist Principals and school leadership teams navigate their digital transformation journey.
Investing in a digital future
The first commitment of the seven-year Schools Digital Strategy is to ensure rural, regional, and remote schools are brought up to the digital equivalent of their metropolitan counterparts through its Rural Access Gap program.
A key component of that is the DMP which will help these schools identify and deliver technology and resources to support their continuous improvement.
Before the end of 2023, 1000-plus schools will receive the benefits of more than $365 million of Digital Restart Fund investment.
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Digital Maturity is a school’s ability to take advantage of technology as it develops.
The Digital Maturity Planner is a tool designed to help schools assess and benchmark their digital maturity and plan a path to digital best practice.
By connecting to the department’s data warehouse, this tool surfaces existing data about each school. The school leadership team can review their school’s data and provide further details through a comprehensive survey.
Once the survey is completed, the school is given their digital maturity level for each of the domains of the Schools Excellence Framework: Learning, Teaching and Leading.
Based on these digital maturity levels, the school leadership team is presented with a list of priorities, each with allocated professional learning resources attached. These priorities offer guidance on what areas the school should focus on, to reach the next level of digital maturity.
The school leadership team can select the priorities that are most relevant for their school to include in their plan.
The planner displays the selected priorities against a timeline. The school leadership team can customise this planner, and allocate resources to the term, or terms, that best suit the needs of their school.
Custom rows can be added by the school leadership team, to plan and track school specific initiatives, with attached activities, resources, milestones, or objectives.
From this a Digital Action Plan can be created. This Digital Action Plan can be downloaded for distribution with the school staff and can also be uploaded as evidence for the school plan in SPaRO.
A Digital Support Team member from the Rural Access Gap program will help fine tune and validate the plan and will assist the school to improve their digital maturity over the coming year and beyond.
Bridging the Rural Access Gap – accelerating digital equity in schools across the state.
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Leveraging technology for better student outcomes
For the Rural Access Gap program to improve access to and use of technology so that students achieve improved outcomes, we need to assess each school’s digital maturity.
As best practice for using technology can differ between schools, we ensure school leaders and staff are central to that process. We understand they are the experts in terms of their school's context, and time with quality educators is the most crucial element for improving student outcomes.
These elements are embedded in the DMP, which was co-designed with Principals and school leaders. As a result, the tool provides the initial assessment to help delivery of the program, limits the administrative burden, and reduces the number of school engagements by one third.
How the Digital Maturity Planner works
The DMP is the digital concierge that scales assessment of digital maturity and recommends next steps of a school’s digital transformation.
The tool guides school leaders to consider what 'good use' of technology looks like and provides them with the resources to plan and implement improvements. Integrated into the school engagement process, the DMP consists of three elements:
1. Digital Context Card: A unique data dashboard that shows the current digital context of a school.
2. Digital Maturity Survey: A series of questions to determine a school's level of digital maturity which is aligned to the department's Schools Excellence Framework.
3. Digital Action Plan: A tool to help school leaders plan their digital development using a personalised set of resources based on the answers provided in the survey.
Preparing a Digital Action Plan with school leaders
As part of the process, school leaders work with key school staff to validate the digital context data and answer 24 questions in the Digital Maturity Survey. This point-in-time assessment provides the basis for in-depth conversation with the Digital Support Team (DST).
The result is the Digital Action Plan which, tied to school strategic goals, is housed in the DMP, and implemented by school staff with support and mentoring from the DST.
One of the keys attributes of the DMP is that it is always evolving in terms of usability and functionality. The lessons learned from its implementation also inform the development of other school assessment and planning platforms.
Our focus now is on delivering more extensive resource content into the planner to ensure that it remains a useful, usable tool for school leaders and the program.
Learn more
For more information, email schoolsdigitalstrategy@det.nsw.edu.au.