Kyle Berger

Executive Director of Technology
Alvarado ISD

Kyle Berger is the Executive Director of Technology at Alvarado ISD. Not only has he led his district the past five years towards effective technology integration, but he was recently presented with the prestigious Technology Administrator of the Year award at the February 2009 TCEA State Conference.

You might wonder why Kyle was honored with such an award. Perhaps it was the fact that he instituted the district’s first instructional technologists and technology training center. In addition, he was responsible for the installation of mounted projectors in 90% of all classrooms as well as interactive whiteboards and doc cameras in 80% of classrooms. In January of 2009, AISD opened a new campus utilizing one-to-one learning with all students in fourth through sixth grades having their own laptop. He has effectively changed the mindset in AISD about technology and has been featured in numerous publications for technology success.

When asked how district/school websites helped in his efforts to be a more effective Technology Director for Alvarado ISD, Kyle commented:

A district’s website is a valuable tool that is used for so many aspects of our jobs each day. These needs range from communication to our parents and community to putting a face to the success of our students for the world to see. With our advertising abilities, it has provided some source of revenue into the district as well. Most of all, having a website of this nature reduces the typical overhead of an ordinary district website not only technically, but also content management, as well as end user training.

Kyle goes on to elaborate about their choice of web hosting providers:

In our school district, parent communication is key to our children’s success. Finding a tool that can facilitate that communication and keep all the stake holders of the district informed is a priority for any district. Upon evaluating several companies and their offerings, we found that SCHOOLinSITES was able to provide the best overall solution including ease of use and best overall cost-effective approach.

Kyle credits his communication director, Tommy Brown, for a great deal of success with the website. After initial training, Tommy and Instructional Technology Coordinator, Julie Holland, set out to involve all the staff at the schools and district office to take ownership of posting information to the sites. This has created a tremendous resource for all who visit the sites. Julie, a parent herself, remarked,

Parents & students have a single "clearinghouse" for documents, latest news and announcements. This is the first place most of them look for information. Definitely cuts down on phone calls and saves time for parents and school staff.

Parents also benefit from having a consistent interface - even if they have students at multiple schools, navigation of all campus and teacher webpages is consistent so they can easily find the information they need. Parents also benefit from having an easy method of contacting teachers (email form). Students and parents both benefit most when teachers choose to post resources/documents for them. They have anytime access to them.

Tommy is pleased with his ability to involve individuals at the schools in posting news articles which keep the websites “alive” with information.

A big part of being a Public Information Officer in our district getting good news out in front of the public as fast as possible. With SCHOOLinSITES, we have the capability to get it on the front of our website instantly. With SCHOOLinSITES, each school's webmaster has the capability of pushing their news to the district site, which is an incredible help. I can then review these new articles and decide which ones are the most suitable for our district’s home page.

Tommy goes on…

Our staff, parents and community can find information easily. No matter what they are looking for, they can find it within minutes. It wasn't always that way before.

You may be wondering how Kyle, Tommy and Julie found such success with their SCHOOLinSITES websites. Kyle was happy to share his point of view:

The one thing I hear most often from my teaching staff within the district is the ease of use of the product. This is an important feature of SCHOOLinSITES. Unlike other applications that perform similar results, SCHOOLinSITES has developed a streamlined approach and a user- friendly interface that permits for all skill levels of users to update their own content each day.

Kyle is very proud of the efforts put forth by Tommy and his staff in creating their new online resource. We are equally proud to have Alvarado ISD as our new featured website.