ICT is the global enabler in Schools

I have been hiding the evangelist in me away from blogging for the last few months.  I feel that now is the time to release the evangelist.

This release is probably due to the fact I have been trying to rationalise the frustration I felt which moved me to leave the School I had been very happy working at.

I have been considering for several years how important ICT is in modern Schools and how little understanding of this importance goes into the Strategic and Operational Management outside specific ICT areas.

I can't imagine how a modern school could manage to function with paper (as opposed to ICT) based systems.  Everything from classes to school management to events with public, parents and alumni involvement to facilities management and even supporting grounds and gardens is now dependent upon Information Systems.

There is no-one involved in a school who is not touched buy the Information Technology deployed by the school.  The first contact most people now have with a school will be via the web site. Parents and family are contacted by schools with digital newsletters and other information, reports are now delivered digitally.  Every class and hence every student now will be exposed to, or facilitated by a computer system.  The teacher reports attendance, performance and behavior digitally before analysing these inputs on a school provided computer system.

Why then do some school leadership teams believe that scrimping on these systems will deliver long term benefits?  Spending wisely and well will deliver unbelievable benefits in the medium term.

My issue is how do those ICT specialists convince school leadership of this potential.  Every vendor I speak with expresses a frustration with  how little schools are prepared to spend on ICT.  Most school ICT professionals express the same frustration.  In the indomitable words of Professor Julius Sumner Miller "Why is it so?".

Why do they not get IT?

Why is IT seen as a cost, not a benefit when everyone benefits so strongly from IT?

Even for me the first years managing ICT in a school was about devices and hardware, I now see that the potential is so much more tied to the educational and societal vision for the school.  The ICT in a school is now so ingrained it needs to reflect the key values of the school and that won't happen by buying the cheapest solution, it will only happen by;

Putting IT into the vision!

Spending strongly to make IT deliver the vision!

Is this the start of the end of NAPLAN?

Does the Machine based scoring of Standardised testing signal the end of Single Point in time Standardised testing?

Late last month the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) General Manager, Dr Stanley Rabinowitz was quoted in an ITNews Article. He talked about the use of Cognitive Computing to assess the written English part of the NAPLAN tests which will be digitally delivered to students in 2017.

Although this move was opposed by English teachers around Australia I have been talking about this as the emerging and most transformative trend in technology as it fits into education.  

There has been very little real change driven by the huge deployment of technology into education over the last 10 - 15 years.  The reason for this is the quality of education is determined by testing which doesn't assess the competencies delivered by technology.  We don't assess ability to collaborate, create or research, from the myriad forms of information produced by students (and everyone else) or consumption patterns of data from digital sources, in any current assessment I am aware of.  

Although Dr Rabinowitz forecast the standardised test will continue and the change is primarily in the assessment regime.  I believe standardised testing should eventually be delivered as a micro test, a single part of the normal measurement of progress.  The test data can be passed instantly into the ACARA systems to produce a constant progress report on each student which is standardised across all schools.  In this situation the student's progress is constantly being measured against the international standards Governments are so worried about without interfering with teaching and learning as the NAPLAN currently does.

Of course this will disrupt the industry spawned by producing NAPLAN study guides.  

If the questions are digitally trickle fed into the ongoing assessment process, I don't see any opportunities existing for 'teaching to the test' which is one of the widely held concerns with the current NAPLAN system.  

The long term effects of utilising Cognitive Computing 

I can see some big changes flowing from the use of Cognitive Computing at a Government level, initially for assessing NAPLAN but, then for who knows what. 

If it works at this system wide level it will only be a short time before the technology becomes affordable at a school level and will be incorporated into school assessment systems so potentially in the future we will see a system where teachers teach and computer systems assess and analyse.  This would be the first real broad systemic change delivered by technology into education. 

ICT Risk Management in Schools

Thinking about Risk Management has been the impetus for several of the posts I have already published and is likely to be in the future.

This subject probably needs a book written to cover all of the significant risks ICT adoption presents for Schools.  These risks will continue to evolve as technology changes and more technology exists in the classroom.  The risks have grown exponentially with the increase in connectivity in the classroom, especially when there is no-one tasked with analysing and recommending how to manage and minimise that risk.

From Wikipedia;

Risk management is the identification, assessment, and prioritization of risks (defined in ISO 31000 as the effect of uncertainty on objectives) followed by coordinated and economical application of resources to minimize, monitor, and control the probability and/or impact of unfortunate events^[1] or to maximize the realization of opportunities. Risk management’s objective is to assure uncertainty does not deviate the endeavor from the business goals.^[2]

I am not sure what Risk Management philosophy schools in general take, as I have never been involved in the process of risk management within a school.  As the Manager of ICT Operations I did expect to be involved but it didn't happen.  At my previous employment, Risk Management was a significant management expectation and assets were liberally applied to identifying risk and reducing potential impact.  At various times I have been involved in a Risk Management task force, Risk Management Committee and Business Continuity Planning group.  I was also tasked with writing many of the Risk Management policies for ICT at my previous employment.

Without formal acknowledgement of the potential for risk there will never be any effort spent on true assessment and reduction processes.  I know this isn't core business for Schools and has never been part of the process, however, we have now started creating organisational and personal risk from deploying technology.  The worst part is we have been slowly increasing this risk for many years and at no time stopped and analysed that risk.

I was going to list the risk schools are exposed to but think I will save that for my next post on the subject.  Instead, I will propose some examples which are real.  I won't acknowledge either the schools or staff involved in these examples, however I will point out the risk exposure a real business would have to address.  The first is a legal risk within the bounds of new privacy laws; the second is operational risk associated with running highly complex ICT environments without sufficient succession planning.

The Lighthouse Teacher

I know those of us who promote the constructive and adventurous use of technology in the classroom seek to develop the Lighthouse teacher.  They are adapting technology in their classroom to achieve the best outcomes possible.  However, they're the ones who could potentially be exposing their Schools to the greatest risk.  I know of one such teacher who was putting together lessons on edmodo, then setting up Google accounts for students and linking to many web sites which were able to fit very well into thelesson plan for those students.  Sounds great doesn't it?
Who was taking the due diligence on the sites to ensure the students privacy was being protected?
As the teacher was creating the accounts used for this exercise should they have been ensuring everything was suitably secured?
Should the teacher have been checking the policy for every site to ensure everything they were trying to achieve was within their guidelines?
Did the teacher know and understand the legal implications of signing up for these 'free' on line services?

Of course the teacher was blissfully unaware of any implications of their actions.

The School was blissfully unaware of the teachers actions and hence the implications.

The busy ICT Manager in the medium sized school

This is a person who has come into an educational setting with a wealth of industry experience and is the only ICT support person on staff.  He picks up on the poor quality of hardware previously deployed and uses his abilities to build a fantastic infrastructure package for the school.  He then leads them through a deployment of significant numbers of devices.  Now he is the only full time support person supporting technology in a school with more than 600 deployed student devices and all of the supporting infrastructure.  

The work is overwhelming, however, the school doesn't need to worry as this person is fantastic he makes things seem simple.  Unfortunately for the school he is the only one with any knowledge of the very complex environment and has pointed out to school leadership the risk this poses but no-one seems to care.  

This significant operational risk is easily mitigated by having a company come in to audit and document the infrastructure.  However, this isn't seen as a risk so no action is taken.

Final word

I know that risk around ICT exists in schools.  How schools monitor and address that risk without impact on teaching and learning will be an interesting exercise.

Can other industries learn from the efficiency of school ICT support?

I wonder if many ICT Managers in general industry understand the efficiency many school ICT departments must maintain.

When I think of my life before school support I remember the PC support team of four, which grew to 6 if you included the contractors supporting the Apple hardware.  There was a network support team of 6 and more than 20 in the servers/applications area with at least five managers leading up to the CIO.  

The total number of endpoints would be very significant in local industry terms with more than 600 PCs but these were all corporate managed desktops with less than 50 mobile devices and about 120 Apples.  There was also several hundred mainframe terminals which were maintained by the IT department.  The network was big with multiple redundancies and about 20 Cisco switches four VLANS but it was before wireless so that was not a concern.

Now I think of the school, 4 technical support staff with me as a manager.  More than 1200 endpoints, more than 800 of them mobile devices taken home by students who were quite happily using them to get as many malware infections as possible.  The other 400 were mostly mobile with about 150 desktop computers.  We had 35 switches, almost 100 wireless access points and a constant battle to ensure the network wasn't attacked from within.

I have recently met with two smaller schools both of whom have support departments of one but never the less support hundreds of end points, virtualised server infrastructure, complex networks with 10 - 20 switches and more than 30 wireless access points.  I consider this almost untenable but the schools expect that they will have systems available at the same level as you would expect in a corporate environment.

The advantage all Corporate/Business IT support departments have is the ability to put costs to outages and use ROI calculations to determine the value of IT support staff.  I have yet to see a dollar value placed on outages in a school.

What is the cost of a student being out of class having their Computer fixed?  How much do we lose if a teacher loses a lesson due to system outages.  What would the cost be if that teacher then changes their teaching practice to avoid technology following an issue?

So schools end up using as little as possible to do as much as possible and accept the risk of failure caused by insufficient resources.  However, very rarely are there failures which put systems off line. Without management having realised the risks we took, new systems come on line, systems are updated and old systems decommissioned
.  

Happiness is a connected digital classroom

As a technical specialist not a teacher this might seem to be a bit off topic for me.  However as part of a life skills program at my school the ICT support staff ran a Computer Skills course one period a week for the Year 8 students.  The experience of being in the classroom was fantastic.  It also put into perspective the challenges teachers face with technology in the classroom.

I had no idea how effective technology was as a tool to engage students until we were supervising those classes.  The curriculum was focused on teaching the use of technology, so  we were able to have project based tasks which were fun for the students.

My enduring memory of those classes was how often we'd run late as students would get so engaged with the technology.  Often they were problem solving the capabilities of the software within the context of the task they had been set.

I have no illusions about being a teacher in a conventional classroom.  I would not feel comfortable and probably couldn't engage the students by myself.  However, when we were using technology and with my personal comfort level with that technology I found it quite easy to make things happen and could see how easily the students engaged with their technology and the tasks, despite my lack of teaching skills.

The entire experience did reinforce my belief in the value of anytime access to technology in a connected classroom.  It also reinforced my belief in the value of a solid support network for teachers in the use of the technology, the value of teachers feeling confident about the reliability of the technology as well as being competent in the use of technology.

Creating 'Community' for ICT Support Staff

I had a thought provoking conversation with Rob Barugh on Friday.

Rob was talking about how he values the sense of 'Community' within the scope of some ICT Conferences and how a shared sense of purpose is important.

That triggered some serious self contemplation on the value I have for community and how it fits into the overall self value of anyone in a specialised field.  I've spent a lot of time contemplating why my sense of 'Community' within the school faded over the twelve years I worked there but grew with other ICT Professionals over the years.

I think it's the feeling of shared challenge and achievement we feel when we gather as a community.

Within the school, the acknowledgement of achievement by the ICT team was very limited.  There was in fact, normally, no acknowledgement for what we were achieving with very limited resources and wasn't valued or in any way worth taking about.  The classroom challenges for teachers were shared in the staff room and acknowledged at staff meetings and in public forums at every opportunity. 

Within ICT community gatherings (normally at conferences or PD opportunities) we all got an opportunity to acknowledge each other's efforts and converse about them.  This served to increase our sense of worth and community.

It's been spoken about for many years; there needs to be more opportunity for the growth of community of ICT staff in schools.  There are State based collaborative areas and some of these are quite strong with the AISNSW group as a great example of how this can be achieved.  Unfortunately we still don't have a national group supporting this community. 

Fortunately I am now in a position to expend some effort on building the platform for that community.  I wonder what it should look like and how it can be curated to be of value as well as capture the strengths of community.  Any suggestions and comment would be gratefully accepted but I will make something interesting happen.

Why Cloud deployments are not the answer for ICT in schools

It's apparent that 'Cloud' has impacted significantly on the development of school's ICT. 

However, this isn't necessarily happening in the way vendors had hoped.  The adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS) has been huge across the board with everything from Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps for Education to Mathletics and web based learning solutions to the innumerable iPad apps with web back ends.

The thing that seems to be missing at the moment is a similar focus on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS).  In the immortal words of Professor Julius Sumner-Miller, "Why is this so?".  Some schools have deployed IaaS, most commonly a Back Up as a Service solution or some virtualised machines in data centres; these services seem to have had much more traction in the commercial space. 

Why have schools not adopted this?  This is a very important question for many vendors as they see IaaS as a large opportunity for sales growth into the school sector.  However some very significant issues will hamper sales of these infrastructure services into the school sector.

Single site

Most schools exist as a single site. There won't be many companies with IT infrastructure the size and complexity of a school who exist on a single site.  The value of having an IaaS cloud solution is multiplied many times when you operate a diverse multi site environment.  In a single site the cloud solution means the school is totally dependent upon their Internet connection.  This could mean significant extra cost in having a second link to remove the single point of failure.  The main effect of this is when looking at the benefits of cloud we immediately remove some of the most significant positives and increase the negatives.

There are a few schools who are not single site and the organisations representing multiple schools such as Catholic Education Office and Swan Christian Education Association which are not limited by this concern.

Of course the other consideration is we do have significant access needs for parents and students from of campus which is improved by cloud technologies.

Lack of a cost benefit

Significant numbers of schools have adopted Virtualisation at a higher rate than other industries.  The immediate benefits of Virtualisation is important to schools with significant hardware and support cost savings. Now many of us are on our third generation of virtualised servers and have no interest in losing those savings.  This means when we are comparing the costs of IaaS solutions to our current environment there are normally no savings available and often the cloud based solution is costing more with little obvious benefit.

There are schools still moving down the virtualisation path. They will benefit from moving direct to IaaS.

Hiring patterns

Most schools went through an expansion of their ICT support teams in the period up until 2012.  As a result of this timing most of the Manager/Directors with technical backgrounds came into schools prior to the widespread adoption of cloud.  This means most senior technical staff come from their previous environments with no experience in deploying IaaS, this doesn't mean they're not sure of cloud or doubt it is going to rule the future, it just means we are going to need to be convinced of the real value and security of IaaS.

Bad experiences

Although not widespread there have been pioneers who tried IaaS solutions or even as we did PaaS as part of older projects.  We were trialling a PaaS solution in 2007 but we ended up leaving the trial due to the providers of that service not understanding that taking the service down for updates in week 4 of term 1 would be detrimental to uptake within the school.  When updates were applied to the servers which bought the system down for an extended period and the provider was quite comfortable that they had no need to provide us with an assurance they would not repeat the exercise we decided that we couldn't continue with that risk.

The result is that in 2007 we started to virtualise our environment and continued to prefer the option of controlling our own schedule of updates and patches.

Summary

To summarise my post - The 'Cloud' in particular IaaS is not the answer to any school's IT problems.  We (schools) are not looking for a quick solution to problems which don't exist.  We're looking to make every dollar we spend deliver the best value possible.  At the moment a tenancy in a very expensive data centre doesn't deliver any savings.  We're looking and waiting for the technology to deliver savings for us.  What vendors don't want to understand is; we don't care that much about your profits, and we won't necessarily sign up for whatever is "trendy". 

Protecting the kids

I believe the most important issue with school mandated 1:1 Technology programs is Student Protection.

If you've been following the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse you know that the passage of time will judge harshly anyone not monitoring and working to make children as safe as possible.  I have seen some attitudes to monitoring student activity on their school mandated technology which leads me to believe in 20 years time we could be watching a Royal Commission into the Institutional Responses to online protection of students. 

My first concern is that school leadership don't fully understand the risks for there to be significant harm delivered by a device mandated or even provided by the school. 

The security of the corporate grade firewall we maintain at school may not even pick up on the patterns and sites which are part of activity and could be of harm to students.  Even worse, those limited protections may not even be there when the device leaves the campus and is used for web browsing at home. 

I have seen many schools with great products deployed to make sure students using their device are always under the watchful eye of child protection software which is being developed and updated constantly to fulfil only one purpose, to make every effort to keep students safe.  The decision to abrogate that responsibility to parents is almost certainly flawed.   We have seen over the last few months students leaving their home country to join extremist organisations and their parents apparently not aware of their radicalisation.  

I worry greatly about the first time a school mandated device is used in the grooming of a young person into a radical movement.  I particularly worry because there are far more important problems the student protection software can help with identifying.  I have seen first hand the ability to use this software to identify and potentially intervene in the circumstance where a student is displaying suicidal tendencies.  There are far more students in need of support than there are those likely to become radicalised.  It's my belief that all parents would gladly pay almost anything for the device to have that protection built in.

I know some schools believe students need to be exposed to some risks and taught how to manage those risks.  I believe this is a risk you should be very clear in discussing with your entire community and ensure they're buying in to the premise of allowing that risk; they also need to be well informed on all aspects of that risk.

Legislative Solution

Student protection has been looked at by many companies with strong solutions available which will work in the background on just about any device.  I believe this type of software should be compulsory on any student device.  It should be mandated that devices used by students, if mandated or even proposed by schools, should be required to meet certain child safety standards. In this case Government has not kept up with the risks.  When the Federal Government instituted the NSSCF it was fantastic to see the acknowledgement that students having 1:1 access to technology was essential in the 21^st century.  Unfortunately, at no stage was the impact of take home technology considered as being dangerous for children.

  

The Internal Salesperson

One of the most important roles we take on as the ICT Manager is the job of 'Internal Salesperson'.

When you're presented with an idea, technology, option, and/or proposal that you can see would be of value to your school, you have to be able to 'sell' it to the appropriate person.  This skill is probably the most undervalued and untrained skill expected of you.  You often don't even know this is what is expected, you just have a feeling someone should be told.

How do you become that 'Internal Salesperson'?  We all have most of the skills needed to be able to sell ideas to your Leadership when they need to be involved in the decision.  There are several things to consider as part of your preparation present an idea.

Sanity Check

The first stage of working out the value of a proposition is a quick sanity check with a knowledgeable party.  At one stage I'd seen a fantastic presentation at a Conference I thought would be great for adding some extra data into assessments.  I went to our Dean of Studies with the idea and found out they had been doing something similar using our current database.  This quick 'sanity check' saved me wasting time on further investigation.

How should I present the idea?

The next question is critical to the internal sales effort.  How much effort you put in to the presentation will be at least partially driven by your 'passion' for the proposition. I always tried to figure out the most appropriate person to work out the proposition with.  For instance when I was trying to get approval for print management I had the CFO and Director of Staff and Services involved.  When we were looking at new hardware to work with scientific sensors the Head of Science had to be the co-sponsor of the proposal.  In this way an effective sales pitch will already have some traction before you try to sell it to the Principal.

I'd always start to write the proposal out.  This helps you consolidate the idea into your environment and work through potential issues.  I would do this even when it will only be presented verbally as I find the writing process focusses my mind and I will quite often identify potential issues or even unexpected benefits during my writing.

A very long time ago I had 12 months purely writing strategic papers.  This experience helps me produce reasonably succinct but very dry proposals which all seem to work in my favour when presenting technology proposals to Principals and Leadership teams.

A piece of advice in preparing presentations is highlight risk in the proposal, not only for the execution of the proposal but if there is risk in not adopting it.  It seems there is a limited understanding of risk within School Leadership particularly around technology.  You'll need to use your expertise to highlight not only financial and operational risk but issues such as privacy, copyright and child protection.

How can I sell technology ideas to the Curriculum areas?

Sometimes you can't, but if you can see the technical/operational benefits you should try.  It's a great starting point if you can get input from someone within the Curriculum delivery area to make sure the idea has merit and can fit within their classroom practice. 

I always tried to allow for consideration of other options when the technology was directly for the classroom.  An example; each time we were looking for upgraded display technology I would have determined there was a need and had a demonstration of something which interested me.  However, there was always several options open to us, so the consultative process was critical and my sales pitch included multiple options.       

You are the expert!

This is always the concerning part and the piece of the puzzle that needs you to maintain your self confidence.  You have been empowered by the school to be the expert, don't be afraid to be a advocate for what you see as the best solution.

The Loneliness of the School ICT Manager

The last 12 months has been a bit of a revelation to me.  Since leaving All Saints' I've talked to school ICT Managers across the board in schools ranging from the large rapidly growing schools to the medium sized school which is shrinking and the small school not changing too much.

I now realise how fortunate I was being able to obtain the funding I needed to keep the infrastructure up to a Corporate standard.  Many schools battle for any amount of funding for ICT even though it is now expected that ICT will be critical in delivering curriculum. 

When Managers in schools are forced to keep inappropriate technology operational even though they're operating end point counts higher than you would see in any IT environment in medium - large business.  You need to look at the Corporate or Government sector to see more than 1000 concurrent users in an IT environment but that's normal in the larger schools.  Even small K-12 schools with 400 - 500 end points are not inconsequential. 

One of the challenges is school executives expect ICT will just work like it does at home with very low funding level.  If you search the Internet for information about technology in schools you will find thousands of articles from educators and for educators, however, there are very few for the technical person working in the support of the classroom technology. 

Some companies take it more seriously and will publish information targeting the IT Manager, one example is an excellent blog post by Brett North from Computelec "Measuring up to the Mythical Man" which is no longer available but still relevant.  However, there are, from my experience, very few peer generated resources for those working at the coal face providing technical support for classroom use of ICT.

I have always felt frustration around that short coming in the fact there are fragmented groups around Australia but no opportunity for a group large enough to be a 'go to' for all those involved in ICT technical support in Education.  This makes it quite a lonely life being a person looking for resources supporting the case for change/improvement for infrastructure and support options.

Finally I understand

I've been trying to figure out what it is about BYOD for schools that rubs me the wrong way; but I think I've finally figured out the problem.

Many schools have tried to change the terminology to BYOT (BYO Technology), BYOOD (BYO Other Device), BYOX (x being an unknown) and just about any other letter with a prefix of BYO.

I think the problem isn't in the last letter, it is in the O which we know stands for Own.  Why would we ever consider ownership as important.  My experience shows that most students consider a device their 'own' as soon as they personalise it.  As soon as the background on their PC is customised it is their 'own'  device.  Another problem with calling it the students 'own' device is most students up until they enter senior school would simply have a device as determined by their parents.  When they are empowered to make that decision it will most likely be whatever is trendy with their peers.

So in schools it would mostly be BYPD (Bring Your Parents Device) and that is fine.

I would like schools to label their personal technology programs as BYLD programs and move the focus from ownership to purpose.  What is BYLD?  It's Bring Your Learning Device.  I think this would place the focus squarely on learning and make everyone in the process become focused on learning not on any side issues which are at best distractions.

If you do run a true program where you don't offer any guidance for parents as to the type of device which should be bought in to your school then BYOD is fine because you're not even specifying the purpose of the device.  If you have any other style of program it should be a BYLD program and you are therefore trying to improve learning with a device of some sort.