Follow The Tech Brick Road(MAP)

 This week I completed a brick for technology.  I didn't know what a brick was in the world of enterprise architecture before this week.  I quickly learned that it is a method of analyzing, organizing, and planning for various very specific topics involving technology within organizations. It is a simple, dense method of looking at current and future standards and protocols, which allows for streamlined planning that leads to maximized financial and output efficiency.  An organization would create a brick for every separate type of technology they have, and update it frequently.  A brick looks like this:

---

This image as a definition came from the National Institutes of Health Enterprise Architecture.  Once I understood what each of the categories embraced, this came into focus as a great tool. For my assignment I chose to put learning management systems for VUSD into the brick, as our district will need to adopt a new LMS in the near future.  It was relatively intuitive to know what to include in each category, although at times there was some overlap that felt a bit ambiguous.  I hope I completed it correctly.  I can absolutely see how creating and using a brick for my own teaching tools and even teaching strategies would be very helpful. At specific school sites I could see grade level teams creating bricks to keep track of what tools they are using to teach and assess, so that they stay current and focused on their ultimate goals, retiring tools as necessary and replacing those with new tools that have been tracked and researched.  A principal would be able to create bricks as a way to keep track of products that are used school-wide.  At a district level I would imagine there could be many, many bricks for all of the various and many products used district-wide.  But what a great, brief, visual to get a researched, balanced, at-a-glance look at a particular category for an organization.  I would think that school districts would want to use tools like this to keep them on track and help to make decisions, especially when budgets are tight and money must be allocated judiciously.