Abstract:

Through the development of strategic plan for ICT integration, educational institutions (EI) could identify elements that are used for supporting ICT integration into educational process and business related activities. Planning the use of ICT in learning and teaching, but also in business activities in primary and secondary school in Croatia is becoming even more important in terms of preparing schools for an educational reform and for effective and appropriate use of ICT infrastructure, enhancing digital skills and raising digital competences of teachers and students.

In order to improve those processes in EI, Croatian Academic and Research Network launched "e-Schools: Establishing a System for Developing Digitally Mature Schools", a EU funded pilot project with aim of raising digital maturity of primary and secondary schools in Croatia. Following the aims of the projects, we have developed a Framework for Digitally Mature Schools (FDMS) which consists of five evaluation areas and five levels of digital maturity, allowing thereby EI to assess their current level of digital maturity (Begičević Ređep et al., 2017). After assessing their current level of digital maturity, the next step was to empower EI to plan the use of ICT in accordance with their mission, vision and strategic goals. Therefore, we have developed guidelines for strategic planning of ICT integration in schools. Using the guidelines, the policy creators and the decision-makers in the EI could developed their own strategic documents and raise the level of digital maturity in the evaluation area of Planning, Management and Leadership.

The main objective of this paper is to present developed methodology for strategic planning of ICT integration that consists of strategic planning techniques that are recommended for developing main elements of strategic documents. The steps and methods we used in our methodology could be described by answering on three main questions: [A1.] What is the present state of the school in integration of ICT? (Situational analysis - SWOT analysis, CREDA analysis, PEST analysis and mission), [A2.] Where does school want to be in the future? (ICT core value and vision) and [A3.] How will the school reach the desired state? (Strategic Initiatives, Strategic Objectives and Annual Action Plan)

The developed Framework for Digitally Mature Schools will be shortly presented in paper with focus on area Planning, Management and Leadership and its elements: Vision, strategic guidelines and objectives of ICT integration; Planning and programming school development from the ICT perspective; Managing the integration of ICT in learning and teaching; Managing the integration of ICT the school's business activities; Learning analytics (LA); Regulated access to ICT resources and the use of ICT in teaching students with special educational needs. The contribution of the paper is also in presenting approach and experience in developing strategic plan of ICT integration in EI in Croatia. We have presented experiences and preliminary results of evaluation of 151 schools that took part in the e-Schools pilot project and implemented developed methodology for strategic planning of ICT integration to raise the level of digital maturity in area of Planning, Management and Leadership.

Keywords:

Strategic planning, Digital maturity, ICT integration, Primary and secondary schools, e-School.