With all the negative press recently about government programs for improving schools and education it’s tempting to be a little cynical when yet another official is wheeled out to snip a piece of ribbon.
But the opening in January of the new Senior School Centre at Sydney’s Pymble Ladies’ College by NSW Governor Marie Bashir is attracting plenty of positive attention in education circles for all the right reasons.
Providing the nerve centre of PLC’s Senior School Centre is a communications solution from Cisco combining presence, unified communications and several other best-of-breed business tools designed to support one of the most sophisticated learning environments ever deployed at a high school anywhere in the world.
Already PLC is ranked as one of the world’s top five schools by the respected UK-based schools form guide The Good Schools Guide International, which mentions no other Australian school in its global report of 2008.
PLC is also the biggest in Australia with 2000 students all the way from kindergarten up to year 12. More than half of these students have a laptop, with a similar proportion having a least a standard mobile if not a more powerful smart phone.
According to PLC’s head of IT, Rathika Suresh, the technology requirements of a school are similar in many ways to those of any commercial organisation, whereby the ability to instantly communicate and share information without physical boundaries translates into superior results. “Our core business is education,” she says. “But what we do with the technology has to make economic sense.”
One of the first cabs off the rank was Cisco’s “Show and Share” system for the sharing of educational video content to improve teaching and learning.
It allows teachers to build secure libraries of learning content and to create communities allowing students to share ideas, while also enabling the creation, publishing, editing and appraisal of videos.
Complementing Show and Share, Cisco Digital Media signage facilitates a richer collaborative experience between students and teachers, combining a broad range of materials. Communications are delivered instantly and in a way which is scalable up and down.
It also ensures teachers and staff are up-to-date with the latest training resources.
Deployed last month, Cisco Quad is a collaboration platform that will bring students together to share ideas and content, collaborate on projects, and interact using chat, voice or video, regardless of where people are located.
It enables teachers to create virtual working groups, with students sharing similar interests able to locate and talk to each other via chat or video conference while also sharing data files, video and other digital materials.
Phase two of the deployment saw the addition of Cisco telepresence, which combines high-quality video and audio to provide a virtual meeting experience replete with direct eye contact, body language and other features of direct physical communication.
Moreover telepresence is expected to help students access a much broader range of teaching and other professionals, both in Australia and abroad, given its ability to essentially beam people between telepresence nodes.
“It has already been used to link students with experts in the field, including a virtual meeting with NASA,” notes Suresh, adding that telepresence is also expected to become commonly used system for facilitating inter-school debating.
Also coming on stream later this year are Cisco Unified Communications and Cisco Unified Computing System supporting advanced voice services with telephony, paging, voicemail, applications for broadcast messaging and parental notification and more.
Suresh expects this will lead to lower overall cost of ownership, increased agility as well as investment surety once the various communication systems are virtualised within a next- generation, integrated data centre.
Teachers already have cordless VoIP phones from Cisco running over the Wi-Fi network and Suresh says the short-term plan is to have around 200 UC handsets. The schools will also soon be taking possession of a handful of Cisco’s new enterprise-oriented Cius tablets.
While the solution at PLC is highly sophisticated by education standards, it is also more advanced than that currently available at many similar sized businesses. The uniqueness of the deployment therefore demanded PLC approach the project with caution so the needs of teachers and students were properly addressed.
“There were specific problems we wanted to resolve,” she stresses. “Collaboration, sharing of video, media, and the need for more flexibility – everything they [students ] needed to progress with their education.”
Much of the legacy equipment at PLC was from 3Com and NEC. Most of the gear was deployed years ago when the school had fewer students and staff. PLC looked at alternative solutions from vendors but wasn’t satisfied they had the necessary smarts to deliver the best solution.
“We were moving from a medium-sized organisation to a large organisation,” Suresh says. At the end of the day Cisco was able to deliver a better solution. Things that were hard with 3Com became seamless with Cisco.”
The other thing that pleased Suresh about going with Cisco was that the school was able to effectively standardise on the one platform, meaning the management of future projects would be less troublesome. “We knew we needed to standardise.”
The school worked with Cisco via two of the company’s partners, UC specialists iVision and networking integrator Somerville.
While iVision was largely concerned with the video side, Somerville provided the UC solution which encompassed switching, delivery of the wireless network, LAN management as well as call manager, communications manager, unified voice mail and presence.
Company director David Folkard says that while Somerville has plenty of experience in the education market, the deployment at PLC presented him with a fairly steep learning curve.
“There was a fair amount of this that was brand new for me,” he recalls.
In addition the school set a very aggressive deadline.
“The biggest challenge was that there was a deadline of January 29,” Folkard recalls. “That was their cutting of the ribbon and opening day when Marie Bashir was ready to open the new building. Everything had to be up and running for that day, and the following week, when around 2000 students came back to school.”
Key to the project’s success was the appointment by Somerville of a dedicated project manager to oversee the deployment.
In common with many CIOs within larger professional organisations, Suresh must also deal with the reality of personal devices such as smart phones, which seem to be getting into the hands of younger and younger children.
Further down the track she envisages students interacting with the Cisco environment from within the fixed and Wi-Fi environments at school as well as via their own phones.
In addition she is working to harness student’s fondness for social networking sites to create further channels for communication and the sharing of experiences.
But once again Suresh stresses the need to properly assess the benefits for the school of any new technology. “We’re not simply looking to jump on the bandwagon, it has to make sense.”
The new system is also expected to encourage a greater degree of involvement with parents, for instance with school reports soon
expected to be generated and accessed digitally. It is further expected to greatly assist teachers in student governance.For instance PLC now has a touch-screen kiosk in each classroom which acts as a digital roll call.
“Girls use their library card and swipe themselves in once they enter the classroom,” Suresh explains. “If a girl is not swiping the class she is supposed to be in, an alert is generated.”
The application was written using Adobe Air, the software company’s web development platform.
Suresh estimates the PLC environment hosts around 600 different applications, which have enabled a larger degree of tailoring for particular teacher, student and subject needs.
“Every student is different, and different at every stage. We make solutions that even the creators [original software vendors] don’t know about.”
For Cisco, the PLC deployment illustrates perfectly the company’s approach for its burgeoning education business, according to Ken Boal, director of Cisco Australia/New Zealand’s Public Sector Business.
“Cisco’s partnership with schools such as Pymble Ladies’ College is based on the simple premise of building a platform that enables highly engaging, online, video-based curricula to involve, challenge, and inspire students,” Boal says.
“This platform also provides teachers and staff with the information they need about students, scheduling, and administrative matters, around the clock, from anywhere.”
Cisco hopes its platform will see it make further inroads into the education market. Already the company is a foundation partner with Ideas Lab, the IT component of the Victorian Government’s $2 billion program to upgrade the state’s education system. Intel and Microsoft are among the other key vendors involved.
The networking juggernaut is also working with the Victorian Department of Early Education and Child Development to build a wired and wireless network capable of supporting one-to-one computing, mobility, high definition video and the sharing of digital content.
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