Optimize Digital Learning:
5 Steps for Preparing Your Budget
A five-step guide to help K-12 district leaders save time, maximize budget and impact, and make collaborative, data-driven edtech decisions.
Introduction
As instructional technology, finance, and IT teams review edtech investments and plan for the next budget cycle, the end of ESSER funding adds a new challenge. With tighter budgets, making strategic, data-driven decisions is more critical than ever.
This process involves assessing current edtech investments and their impact, setting clear goals and objectives, facilitating discussions among cross-functional teams, ensuring compliance with privacy policies, and developing a budget allocation strategy.
As you review your edtech ecosystem and prepare your digital technology budget, our in-house experts at Lightspeed Systems® and K-12 district leaders created a five-step guide to help you save time, maximize budget and impact, and make collaborative, informed decisions in the process.
- Gather data to better understand app engagement, challenge areas, and total impact.
- Evaluate data and identify strategic priorities for the new school year.
- Ensure a secure technology infrastructure by reviewing your edtech’s compliance with data privacy policies.
- Identify recommendations and funding sources for edtech spending.
- Review and finalize your budget proposal for the school year.
By following these best practices, school districts can ensure that budgets are being managed effectively, that IT investments are delivering the desired results, and that students are getting the most out of their education technology investments. Let’s dive in!
Lightspeed Insight™ delivers app analytics that create a compliant, optimized edtech ecosystem. Track activity across all OSes and devices, district-wide down to individual student usage. Expedite privacy policy review and regulatory compliance, app approvals, and public list creation while optimizing budgets by identifying redundant apps and evaluating ROI. Gain valuable insights to enhance instructional impact and pinpoint teacher training needs, ensuring your edtech delivers maximum value.
01 | Understanding App Usage and Challenges
Data collection is fundamental to making decisions about technology investments. However, it can also be the most difficult if your district doesn’t have a centralized tool to track and review app analytics.
These questions can help you kickstart the process:
- What apps are being used?
- What is the level of usage/engagement?
- Who is using it? Which teachers, in which grades and schools?
Since access to more granular data may be scattered across teams, it’s important to consult with all relevant stakeholders. These include:
Curriculum Leaders & Educators
Curriculum leaders, education coaches, and educators may liaise with vendors to understand app usage and insights that describe the educational impact of their district’s digital tools. Connect with these teams to identify your lead contacts.
IT Leaders
Your IT team has access to a wealth of data that can provide additional insights, such as ticket requests to inform what apps have been the most challenging to use.
Save time by replacing manual data collection with a single source of truth that pulls data from all devices and operating systems. With Lightspeed Insight™, access a succinct view of all important app information in one place, including:
- App usage at the district, school, grade, and student level
- App description, category, and third-party reviews
- Usage by platform, operating system, and more
- Top-used edtech tools
02 | Collaborating to Set Priorities for the Year Ahead
Side-by-side with utilizing quantitative data to drive edtech purchasing decisions, it’s important to outline your district’s strategic vision for the year ahead—and to gather feedback involving various stakeholders in the process.
Connect with Administrative, IT, and Finance Leaders
Side-by-side with utilizing quantitative data to drive edtech purchasing decisions, it’s important to outline your district’s strategic vision for the year ahead—and to gather feedback involving various stakeholders in the process.
To ensure resources are being allocated in a way that will have the greatest impact, administrators should be asking:
- What are your educational priorities for the year?
- Should budget allocations be based on improving student achievement? Increasing teacher effectiveness? Advancing the overall learning environment? (In addition, IT, Instructional Technology, and Finance teams have a unique perspective on the district’s needs and offer valuable insight into the budgeting process.)
- Where did you receive the most ticket requests for difficult apps? Does this influence your decision to renew (or consider additional training)?
- How did you allocate your spending across different apps this year?
Track, compile, export, and quickly share reports on budget and spending with Lightspeed Insight™.
Collect Educator Feedback
Teachers are essential to the technology decision-making discussion. They understand the needs of their students and how they engage with the technology in practice. They also know where additional support is needed by way of professional development in order to utilize the technology more effectively. When it comes to understanding parents and their needs, teachers play a key role in gathering their feedback, and have insight into new challenges that have surfaced that could drive decision-makers towards new technology that hadn’t been considered before.
Consider sharing a survey to collect feedback as part of your budget planning process, including questions like:
- What apps did you use the most this year?
What apps did you use that fell into similar categories, and should you consolidate or eliminate that are not offering additional value? - Where were apps underutilized due to professional development needs? Do you want to invest in training to improve the effectiveness of this tool?
- What parent feedback should you consider in your renewal assessment?
View every app in use on your network across all operating systems and quickly identify the most used apps, and which are being utilized across campuses, grade levels, and individual student with Lightspeed Insight™.
Compare categories of apps with Lightspeed Insight™. For example, review how all the math or STEM apps compare in terms of usage metrics, how much you are paying, and what value you are receiving.
03 | Building a Secure Tech Infrastructure
When it comes to building safe digital learning ecosystems in schools, data privacy considerations are crucial. This includes ensuring secure storage and transfer of student and teacher data, protecting against cyber threats, and complying with relevant regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).
Audit privacy policies
Read and understand the privacy policy of the digital learning platform and its partners to ensure they comply with relevant privacy laws and regulations. Are the platforms in use at your school still in compliance? If not, these should be discontinued.
Audit apps in use
Are all apps in use in your district approved by IT administrators? Make sure no apps in use have gone undetected to ensure alignment with privacy policies.
Enhance your application screening process with Lightspeed Insight™’s integrated 1EdTech and Student Data Privacy Consortium badges. These badges offer transparency into app usage across multiple schools and ensure compliance with data privacy regulations such as GDPR, FERPA, and COPPA.
Streamline data privacy management with Lightspeed Insight™, the only edtech management tool to provide policy scanning with change notifications, side-by-side versions, and highlighted changes, so leaders can proactively protect students’ personally identifiable information (PII) from getting into the wrong hands.
Data storage & sharing
Check how the platform collects, stores, and uses data. Understand with whom the platform shares data and for what purposes, and ensure that appropriate safeguards are in place.
User consent: Ensure that users are provided with clear information about the collection and use of their data and that they provide their explicit consent for it.
Third-party integrations
Ensure that any third-party integrations used by the platform also comply with privacy and data protection laws.
Simplify your technology review and ensure data privacy compliance with features like app approval workflows, instant visibility to unapproved apps, real-time privacy policy scanning, and alignment to industry standards with Lightspeed Insight™.
04 | Budget Optimization & Funding
After reviewing administrative priorities, pooling educator feedback, and examining usage data to determine app engagement, consider these questions as you finalize your investment strategy for the upcoming school year:
- How does your current technology align with the district’s long-term priorities? Which digital apps or tools are most and least critical to teaching and learning outcomes?
- What digital technologies are expiring soon? Do you want to renew these tools?
Save time and streamline the license management process by accessing realtime updates into which licenses are active, expiring, or needing review with Lightspeed Insight™.
- How do old and new technology options compare in terms of features, costs, and benefits?
- Are there areas you need to expand and investigate additional investment?
- Are any technology investments worth piloting using your remaining, non-renewable federal emergency funds? Consider where it may be worth pivoting beyond just the tried-and-true.
- What are the goals and objectives for the investments currently in place?
- Are the technologies you have implemented sustainable for long-term changes in budget availability?
Streamline cross-functional decision-making with Lightspeed Insight™’s customizable and shareable reports. Facilitate discussion and expedite edtech review and approval via the App Approval workflow, which enables teachers to request new apps for review by IT and Instructional Technology teams.
Federal Funding Resources
Next, determine funding sources and application deadlines for your district.
Here’s a list of top federal resources for quick reference:
- Title I, Part A: Provides financial assistance to schools with high percentages of low-income students.
- Title II, Part A: Supports professional development for teachers, including technology integration training.
- Title IV, Part A: Provides funding for student support and academic enrichment programs, including technology.
- Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE): Provides funding through various programs, including the Innovative Approaches to Literacy program and the Small, Rural School Achievement program, to support technology in schools.
- Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA): Provides funding for technology that supports students with disabilities
Additional funding sources include:
- State/District Funding: Districts can work with state and district officials to secure funding for education technology initiatives. Check with your local or state education service agency for additional resources.
- Professional Development Grants: Grants for professional development in technology integration can be used to fund education technology initiatives.
05 | Crafting & Finalizing a Data-Driven Budget Proposal
Now that you’ve developed an understanding of how your technology is being used, identified challenges, wins, and opportunities for your investment strategy, and obtained a clear picture of your funding sources, you’re ready to build a final budget proposal.
As you do so, consider questions like:
- What is the total cost of ownership, including software and training expenses?
- How much money are you spending (and/or wasting)? Where are you using it?
- Which technologies will be renewed, dropped, or “net new” this upcoming school year? What are the justifications for these changes?
Lastly, don’t forget these key considerations:
- Define the Objectives: Clearly state what the budget will be used for and what you hope to achieve with the technology.
- Calculate the Costs: Determine the costs of software, licensing, implementation and training, and any other related expenses.
- Justify the Costs: Provide a clear explanation of why each technology is necessary and how it will support your objectives.
- Review & Revise: Review your budget proposal with stakeholders, make revisions as necessary, and ensure that it aligns with your district's budgeting process.
- Finalize: Present your final budget proposal to decision-makers, including a clear and compelling case for why the technology is necessary and the expected outcomes.
