Planning your school’s digital journey
The Digital Maturity Planner (DMP) was designed to help schools objectively understand their current level of digital maturity, identify gaps, and help build and manage a plan that lifted their digital capabilities.
Co-designed with schools, it assisted Principals and school leadership teams navigate their digital transformation journey.
Investing in a digital future
The first commitment of the Schools Digital Strategy was to ensure rural, regional, and remote schools were brought up to the digital equivalent of their metropolitan counterparts through its Rural Access Gap program.
A key component of that was the DMP which helped these schools identify and deliver technology and resources to support their continuous improvement.
More than 950 schools completed the DMP over the life of the program.
[Narration]
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.
[End of transcript]
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 needed to assess each school’s digital maturity.
As best practice for using technology can differ between schools, we ensured school leaders and staff were central to that process. We understood they were the experts in terms of their school's context, and time with quality educators was the most crucial element for improving student outcomes.
These elements were embedded in the DMP, which was co-designed with Principals and school leaders. As a result, the tool provided the initial assessment to help delivery of the program, limited the administrative burden, and reduced the number of school engagements by one third.
How the Digital Maturity Planner worked
The DMP was the digital concierge that scaled assessment of digital maturity and recommended next steps of a school’s digital transformation.
The tool guided school leaders to consider what 'good use' of technology looked like and provided them with the resources to plan and implement improvements. Integrated into the school engagement process, the DMP consisted of three elements:
1. Digital Context Card: A unique data dashboard that showed 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 was 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 worked with key school staff to validate the digital context data and answer 24 questions in the Digital Maturity Survey. This point-in-time assessment provided the basis for in-depth conversation with the Digital Support Team (DST).
The result was the Digital Action Plan which, tied to school strategic goals, was housed in the DMP, and implemented by school staff with support and mentoring from the DST.
One of the keys attributes of the DMP was that it was always evolving in terms of usability and functionality. The lessons learned from its implementation also informed the development of other school assessment and planning platforms.
Learn more
For more information, go to our Projects and initiatives section.