School districts are notoriously bad at accurately estimating the cost of implementing technology in a K-12 setting. There are any number of reasons...
One of the most common is a tendency to believe the myth that buying computers is more like buying a new gymnasium (which will require minimal maintenance and need replacement only in the dim future) than buying a new school bus (which is known to require regular maintenance and will wear out at a reasonably predictable point in the near future requiring immediate replacement).
Another is the widely held misconception that paying for physical computers is the only significant expenditure associated with implementing classroom technology, when in fact it turns out to be no more than half (and perhaps as little as 10%) of the real cost.
This Web page has been created as an entry point for school teachers and administrators who wish to play some "what if" games with the costs related to implementing technology in their school districts. Our intent is that you can plug in numbers which represent your own school settings, and then view the consequences which using these numbers in real life would produce -- in this case, in terms of the numbers of computers your dollars could buy over time, and the amount of "computer time" this could make available to students in your classrooms.
We have provided a form below where you can fill in four numbers to generate a "what if" scenario. You may use our numbers (which are purely arbitrary) if you wish, but the closer to your own real numbers you get the more valuable to you the results should become. Once you have settled on four numbers and pressed the "send" button, you will move to a page which will provide two different charts.
One chart will provide information on your installed hardware base over the next 15 years, including such figures as the total number of computers in service, the amount of access time available per student, and the annual per pupil expenditure for computer hardware.
The other chart will provide a rough cut at the "rest of the iceberg" -- the other costs associated with implementing technology above and beyond buying the physical computers.
Of course, at any time you may return to this opening page and plug in a different set of values and see where those lead.
Here is what the four figures represent...
District size is the number of students in your school
district.
Cost per computer is the unit cost for the type of computer
you wish to install, in dollars.
Hardware life span is measured in years; it is how long you
expect to keep your computers before retiring them. Figures above 3
years will require spending upgrade funds to keep them in service;
figures beyond 7 years betray poor reality orientation.
Annual hardware budget is the total amount of money you
propose to spend on computer hardware, per year, over the next few
years (this model is built around the assumption that you will take
this approach rather than making a single huge expenditure, which for
various reasons turns out to be an inefficient way to attack the
problem).