Is your school wasting money on technology?  Here are some areas to look to trim costs and still provide students and teachers with the digital tools they need:

Devices

Don’t use one size fits all.  Schools often buy the same device for all teachers and students.  They often choose devices with middle of the road specs that are overkill for average users and not good enough for power users.  It is important to get teacher input about how they will be using devices in their class to determine what they need.  A teacher that only uses a computer to do word processing, web research and email does not need a $2000 Macbook whereas a digital video teacher cannot get by with a $200 chromebook.  To save even more money consider implementing a BYOD policy.

Software

Don’t buy unneeded software.  Schools sometimes buy expensive software to put on their computers when there are great free alternatives available.  The most obvious example is Microsoft Office.  Google provides Google Apps for Education free to schools which contains everything students need for word processing and for creating slide presentations.   Openoffice is another free alternative to Microsoft Office.  Another area where schools can save money is by using Pixlr instead of Photoshop.  Pixlr Editor offers many of the same features found in Photoshop for free.  Not only are there many free alternatives for software programs, there are also free operating systems.  Open source operating systems like Ubuntu are a great way to revive older computers still running Windows XP or to use instead of updating to Windows 7 or 8.

Textbooks

Get free textbooks.  Textbooks are expensive and become outdated quickly.  Schools have access to millions of primary and secondary sources on the internet and they also now have access to free high quality textbooks in math, science and history from the CK-12 Foundation.

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