“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.
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