Technology Information Center for Administrative Leadership
TICAL’s mission: Helping K-12 administrators provide informed and effective leadership in the use of technology to improve education.
School administrators are busy people with a big job to do! The Internet offers a tremendous range of information, tools, and resources that can help administrators lead their schools and districts to excellence. But what administrator has time to search and sift through hundreds of web pages to find the right resource for right now?
Seeing this problem, the California Department of Education (CDE) commissioned the Santa Cruz County Office of Education to develop a centralized repository of technology related resources and professional development opportunities for California’s administrators. The Technology Information Center for Administrative Leadership (TICAL) was launched!
Located at the TICAL website is information that will help administrators in finding resources to assist in the day-to-day needs of their jobs, whether they are site level principals or district superintendents. These resources have been collected and organized by a cadre of technology-savvy, practicing administrators and met criteria judged to be of value to other administrators.
In 2002, TICAL Arkansas was launched. Under the auspices of the Arkansas Department of Education, a cadre of administrators from that state contributes new resources to our collection and provides orientation and training sessions throughout the state. The culmination of TICAL Arkansas was the Technology Information Conference For Administrative Leadership (TICAL Conference), which was held annually in Little Rock every year until 2016. This conference was made possible through a unique partnership between the Arkansas Department of Education (ADE) and the Association of Arkansas Educational Administrators (AAEA).
In 2008, The first California statewide technology symposium for school and district administrators took place. The Leadership 3.0 Symposium was a collaborative effort of the Association of California School Administrators (ACSA), Computer Using Educators (CUE), and TICAL.