The relationship between principals' technology leadership and the teachers' use of technology

Since the 1980's, the federal government has provided large amounts of funding to place technology in schools. Along with this funding, the federal government has placed emphasis on technology reforms. For a reform effort to be successfully integrated within a school, the school must have an effective principal. A strong correlation between a school's technology leadership and the level of technology integration in a school has been found in the literature. Therefore, this study focused on a principals' technology leadership and the role a principal plays in the level of technology integration within a school. Additionally, this study examined the relationship between the teachers' level of technology integration and a school's performance.;A comprehensive sampling of 988 PreK-12 teachers in Lafourche Parish Schools was given the Stages of Adoption of Technology survey and the Technology Leadership survey. The Stages of Adoption of Technology was used to measure the teacher's technology integration in the classroom and the Technology Leadership survey was used to measure the principal's technology leadership. Additionally, the School Assessment Index was used to measure each school's performance. Each school in the sample represented a unit of analysis.;Once data was collected, a bi-variate correlation was used to determine if the teacher's level of technology adoption was related to the principal's technology leadership and to what degree they were related. Findings revealed a small nonsignificant relationship between a teachers' level of technology adoption and a principal's technology leadership. A full regression model was used to determine if the subscales would predict the teachers' stages of adoption. Results were non-significant, thus indicating that at a school level a teacher's stage of technology adoption cannot be predicted by a teacher's perceptions of a principal's technology leadership. A regression analysis was then used to determine if the level of teachers' stages of technology adoption would predict school performance. Results indicated that a teachers' stage of technology adoption was not related to school performance.