With the new school year well and truly in progress it’s an ideal time for education ICT managers to think about how well the school’s systems are working and to look at how they can be adapted and improved to ensure they continue to be a key component of the education process. Whilst every school or college is different, there are key factors that every ICT manager should consider to help ensure the staff and pupils are getting the full benefit of the IT investment.
Some key considerations are:
Check if upgrades are required and plan for when they are
Whilst hardware usually has a useful life of several years, software can need upgrading more often and it is especially important to make sure the platform the schools network of machines runs on is suitable for the demands of the school. The majority schools are still running Windows XP and Office 2003/2007, so tackling the upgrade to Windows 7, or perhaps Windows 8 and Office 2010 in a cost effective way will be critical to IT budgets over the next 12-24 months. If upgrading the entire IT infrastructure is beyond budgetary constraints it may be worth considering a staggered approach to this.
Naturally the details of what is upgraded will very much depend on budgets and the individual priorities of the school. In some schools this is still very much a hands-on, manual process, so selecting the most appropriate way of automating deployment can be a very helpful, practical consideration.
Make sure communication lines between the school, staff, pupils and parents work effectively and are secure
ICT is all about communication, and yet it is relatively simple for lines of communication to become ineffective. In my experience most schools are looking at some form of parent/student portal, some using their existing school management system, some using their Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and some using Microsoft SharePoint to share information.
In all of these cases security is absolutely critical as obviously the data is sensitive, and even the perception of poor security can be damaging to a school's image. Also, providing secure remote access to internal systems securely can make a significant difference to the cost and complexity of a project, so must be considered from the start.
Decide if In-house, managed services or a mixture of both are better for your school
The manner in which school ICT services are provided is a hotly debated one, but like many other questions the answer can vary heavily depending on the type of education establishment and its circumstances. As with all organisations, schools have the challenge of limited IT budgets and ICT departments are under pressure both from workload and the rapid development of technology.
Managed solutions are an attractive option to reduce management and support overhead, but a school needs an eye on long-term costs, flexibility, control and security. An alternative option is keep systems under the direct control of the ICT team, but work with a partner to provide additional experienced technical or physical resources as and when required. This plugs the skills and manpower gaps, but keeps running costs down, and allows the ICT team to retain ownership of critical systems.
Plan for the worst…
As the old adage goes, you need to plan for the worst and hope for the best in schools’ applies to IT as much as anywhere else. However, it is surprising how often this apparently obvious essential is either missing or neglected within the education sector. Having a solid, well thought out and realistic continuity plan should be an essential part of any school’s ICT function.
I’ve worked with a number of schools to help them create business continuity plans in much the same way that any other business would. The perception is usually that curriculum IT is important to the function of the school, however when you actually look more closely at what would cause the most problems a disruption to the administration, and in particular the finance systems of the school, is (in many cases) clearly the most critical.
Teachers and lecturers can usually fallback to more traditional teaching in the event of a major IT failure; however there can be serious implications for significant disruption to the finance function of a school. For many educational establishments the priority will need to be in remotely backing up data and allowing the relevant staff to have access to this in the event of a major IT outage.
Consider migrating to the Cloud if appropriate
There is a lot of IT industry excitement around the idea of ‘The Cloud’ which delivers IT services via the Internet on a pay-per-use basis, with all of the servers and infrastructure being stored and managed by the service provider via the Internet. A product of vastly improved Internet connection speeds, this idea certainly isn’t a fad, but schools need to carefully weigh up the pros and cons of migrating, or partially migrating services to this model.
Whilst the idea of not having to host your own servers is an attractive one (from a procurement, running costs and facilities point of view) to fully reap the benefits of Cloud Computing requires investing in a highly stable and high speed Internet connection. It is also advisable to seek advice from an experienced independent professional that can help you understand the risks as well as the benefits. It is vitally important to do careful, accurate, long-term cost calculations to find the best savings, as you may find that for some elements of your IT it’s actually more cost efficient to keep it in-house and hosted on local servers. Generally most adopters are introducing Cloud services tactically with specific services, such as their e-mail or Intranet, rather than migrating all their critical services to it.
Look at your printing facilities and costs
Twenty years ago, when ICT was becoming a more common sight in schools, there were predictions that eventually we would see ‘the paperless office’. Clearly that is still not the case and in fact, ironically, the usage of paper has probably increased in that period. But with the proliferation of different IT devices (including smartphones and tablets) has made the need to print a multitude of documents less vital so it is worth schools looking at the number and types of printer in use, as well as the amount of printing that is required.
Paper and especially ink costs can be big costs to the IT budget. It is worth either using a print management system that flags up excessive printing or assigns print quotas and limits (such as restrictions on the number of pages). Better still, encourage staff and pupils to limit printing when possible and only when there is no alternative.
A school’s ICT systems are arguably some of the most important assets it has. With the amount of school budget invested in it and the constraints on spending, there is every reason to make the IT systems work harder and smarter to give pupils and staff the full benefits it can offer.