July 5th, 2006
What Ed Tech Can Learn From Disneyworld
So here I am in Disneyworld, on vacation courtesy of my mother-in-law and her time share. The kids are passed out and I finally have a few minutes to think about Ed Tech. Aside from the ridiculously oppressive heat and the small lizards running around everywhere, the thing that has impressed me the most about Disneyworld is the incredible set of tightly integrated systems that not only create a "magical experience," as they call it here, for me and my family, but also make this multi-billion dollar enterprise run smoothly. Obviously Disney has a bit more cash to leverage than your average school district, but we could all learn a lot about better business through technology from Disney.
The Ed Tech blog and countless other forums are filled with people debating the merits of technology in the classroom. Let’s set that aside for right now. Let’s instead think about how we can run our schools better, as the business enterprises they are (at least on the administrative side of things), through the well-thought out use of information technology.
From the moment you book your vacation with Disney through the moment you leave Orlando, an astonishing array of systems ensures that you have the best possible experience. Calls to vacation planners, front desk staff at various resorts, or online inquiries are met immediately by people who know everything they need to know about you and your vacation. Similarly, admission to the various theme parks is controlled by key cards that are tied to your fingerprint on your first entrance; admission thereafter, regardless of where or when you come and go, only happens if your fingerprint matches that associated with your card.
Changes to your itinerary are simple and quickly propegate throughout the systems. For example, if you finish your last day in the Magic Kingdom and decide that you can’t bear to leave, you can stop by the front desk of your resort and, pending availability, add days to your accommodations, add days to your park admission tickets, and change transportation arrangements. That night, when you go back to the parks for another trip down Splash Mountain, your park tickets will be valid and ready to go.
So what can we take away from this? It’s all about the systems, man…I’ve only scratched the surface of the systems that Disney uses to let me "Feel the Magic." I haven’t even touched upon the systems it uses to run its finances or assist its employees. Disneyworld uses 1100 buses to haul millions of guests around. Imagine the data they can mine from those park admission tickets to determine optimal bus schedules for transportation to each park. Again, I’m barely hitting the tip of the iceberg here.
At the K-12 level, some well-planned systems for running a district will make everyone’s lives easier. Whether it is the choice and implementation of a student management system, or the use of the best budgeting system for a district’s needs, IT must first be used to efficiently run a district in the short and long term, well before we think about how to use it in the classroom. We don’t need computers to teach kids and many would argue that computers just interfere at this level (I’m not one of them, but that’s beside the point). Computers (or better stated, "Information Systems") are an indispensible tool for running a district efficiently and satisfying the needs of regulators and administrators.
For example, in my district, we use a modular piece of software for budgeting, payroll, etc., called BudgetSense. We pay a pretty penny for this very powerful application, but, as it turns out, are still creating our budgets by hand in Excel. A thorough analysis of this system and its implementation in our district could uncover countless ways to save time, effort, and miscalculation and would allow us to fully utilize a system on which we are spending quite a few taxpayer dollars.
It’s not enough to give everyone computers and access to a file server. Nor is it enough to have a few tech-savvy volunteers try to keep the computers up and running and back up the server once in a while. A real systems analysis, by a real systems analyst will save a lot of trouble in the long run and help a district get the most bang for its technology bucks.
Follow Chris Dawson on Twitter! Christopher Dawson is the technology director for the Athol-Royalston School District in northern Massachusetts and a member of the Internet Press Guild. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations, but always keep in mind that the opinions expressed here are his own and not those of his daytime employer, even if he talks incessantly about his day job.
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