assumptions that may influence thinking and decision making pertaining to educational technology. The participants in the study were delimited to technology directors and instructional technology specialists from rural, suburban, and urban school districts in Virginia. While technology directors and instructional technology specialists provide leadership for educational technology, these positions are not the only K-12 educators in Virginia who provide leadership for integrating technology into instruction (Virginia Department of Education, 2010). Because the research broke new ground, a limitation of the study is that as future qualitative studies are conducted in the substantive area, it may become necessary to modify the substantive theory to accommodate new data (Polit & Beck, 2008). No data collection was conducted before the researcher received formal approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) ocategory. The most frequent philosophy of technology category in the study, and the dominant approach to technology decision making was Keep up with technology (or be left behind). Keep up with Technology (or be left behind) emerged as the core category, the central phenomenon that often concerns educational technology leaders. This category emerged early in data analysis, continued to grow in explanatory relevance, and reappeared in-vivo in transcript narratives in various forms, often expressed in those words, or variations of them (see Table 19). The core category with its properties and dimensions involved coding instances from all 31 participants (see Table 18 for coding frequency and Tables 19 and 20 for dimensionalized examples). 262 The data showed that Keep up with technology (or be left behind) emerged as