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After clearly defining the core beliefs about educational technology that guide the work of state technology directors, members of the Technology Leadership Skills for the 21st Century Work Group focused on creating a clear set of standards delineating key attributes of an effective technology leader. This work group determined that, in order to understand what strategies are needed to help educational technology leaders maximize their effectiveness, they must first take this initial step of more clearly characterizing an effective technology leader. Thus, one subgroup focused on defining the role and characteristics of an effective educational technology leader. They identified a set of informal leadership standards and guidelines that would both help state directors understand their roles and make other stakeholders more aware of the function of this role.

These standards are intended to inform new state directors of their roles, responsibilities and opportunities and can serve as a guide for current state directors to gauge their performance as an educational technology leader. This set of characteristics and guidelines is a distillation of the multiple areas of leadership encompassed in the job of technology leader. By recognizing these broad aspects of leadership, these guidelines may serve to remind state technology leaders that-though not obvious to them-many actions they take do, in fact, demonstrate technology leadership. This set of key characteristics and attributes of an effective educational technology leader can be used to inform others within a state education department about the roles and responsibilities encompassed in this position. This set of standards could also potentially be used as an overarching guide for the direction the role of state educational technology director is taking as the use of technology in education continues to evolve and becomes increasingly central to education in the 21st century.

In establishing these standards, this group first identified generic characteristics of an effective leader. They then focused more specifically on the characteristics of an educational technology leader. The group built on standards work already done by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), who has delineated standards for educational technology leaders at all levels. This group used ISTE's National Technology Standards for Administrators (NETS·A) as a foundation and adapted some of these standards to specifically fit the role of a state educational technology director. Included with the standards are some specific actions state educational technology leaders can perform to work toward meeting these specific benchmarks. A possible next step that could serve to supplement these standards is a compilation of real-life scenarios and behaviors that could accompany each standard or level of achievement.