Educational Technology Leadership

  Educational Technology Leadership The leadership function is the core job in any educational institution; where the policies, standards, and regulations are created, as well as, structuring and developing the entire culture of the firm. Technology has changed tremendously over the past 50 years and there have been many initiatives that have tried to use technology to change education. Subsequently, this extraordinary influence of modern technologies resulted in completely different mindsets of the new generations with various perceptions, mentalities, and cultures. Similarly, it increases the efforts to grow and meet the needs of a rapidly changing world that increasingly requires more leadership competencies, not less. It affects the ability to successfully recruit and retain talented leaders in what is wholeheartedly believed is the most competitive environment of our lifetime. However, it can be said with confidence that virtual reality, blended learning, online teaching, machine learning, augmented reality, robotic teachers, remote leadership and open-source technology top the agenda of almost every educational entity nowadays. Nonetheless, the missing gap between the traditional ways and modern methods of leadership is enormously large and needs to be filled out and tightened for quality and improvement requirements. Leadership development is part of lifelong learning and involves multiple dimensions of constructs involving skills, attitudes, knowledge, experiences and process. (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001; Drago-Severson, 2004). Indeed, this cannot be accomplished without the involvement of current top leaders who can act quickly to reform their attitudes, expand their knowledge and reinforce their skills to match 21st century leadership needs, leading to sustainable development. The mega expansion of social media applications and latest versions of new the media such as Web 4.0 technology or even previous versions become effective tools in learning process and increasingly has taken the lion share in modern educational systems. These innovations are used widely by most of the stake holder of educational process, especially by technology natives who are technology savvy than the people trying to learn or teach them. These generations who bring experiences from the social media and global strategic games with them to educational entities need timely up-to-date leadership, as leaders have to present in time not in space. As a result educational leaders need to be well prepared to foresee the current and future influence of this continuing trend and drive their institutions accordingly at the right speed.