CRN's summit on the future of education technology drew together a headmaster and IT managers from leading private schools in Sydney, resellers in the education industry and sponsoring vendor D-Link.
CRN: Today I wanted to look at why schools are investing in technology and what types of technology they're intending to buy, and the challenges they face in rolling out these technologies. Ray, your school has started building its wireless infrastructure to move to mobile computing for your students. What hurdles must be overcome?
Ray Paxton (headmaster, Waverley College): A key issue is that often the development and implementation of technology outstrips the teachers' understanding of what learning is. Schools tend to have a problem with that nexus between teacher development in terms of what learning should look like and can look like. We're always playing catch-up with the human dimension because technology is moving faster than it. At the moment we are trying to develop a new learning statement for the school which sits with the technology that's available.
Ray Paxton, headmaster, Waverley College
Simon Potter (IT manager, Waverley College): One of the biggest challenges we face is having that technology adopted into the classroom. The funding that's been made available by federal government policies has not meant that we are implementing stuff that we weren't going to, it's meant we've brought forward five-year plans. But then there's quite a big step to then having that technology adopted by the teachers.
CRN: What are the first steps for setting up a wireless network?
Potter: Our first step was to go through the process of finding a company that we felt confident could help us do that. Waverley had never had a wireless network. We knew that we would need to have a robust network in place to support additional devices. The first stage was to find a vendor and a reseller we felt confident could help us in that process. We looked at three key manufacturers and discussed it with each of the resellers. We wanted to make sure they were comfortable working in and understood the nature of the education space and that we felt happy they could deliver the product that we required.
CRN: What does it mean when you ask a reseller or a vendor, do you understand the education space? What are you looking for?
Westley Field (director of online learning and IT, MLC Girls School): You don't want to know about the vendor or the technology, you don't want to have any problems. The important thing with technology in schools is that it doesn't get in the way. What you're trying to achieve as a school has to come first and the technology has to fit within that seamlessly.
With D-Link we've had fewer dramas than we've had in the past - things just work. It's critical technology develops independence in students to work whenever they want to work, with anywhere, anytime access. Within the school, inside their classrooms, outside their classrooms, in the playground, in the city, in Broken Hill, wherever they want to be.
We have to have a solution that allows students to act as business people and develop those skills and understanding. So it needs to be that seamless integration between what we're trying to achieve as a learning institution and the technology that supports that. So we don't want to have to do it the vendor's way, we want to do it our school's way.
CRN: Are there any similarities you are seeing as a vendor in requests from schools such as speed, bandwidth, coverage or number of devices?
Domenic Torre (managing director, D-Link Australia): The challenges - whether it's education or any other industry or marketplace - are very similar: security, coverage. Ease of management is even more important in the education environment. In a lot of schools the principal takes care of the network.
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| Domenic Torre, managing director, D-Link Australia |
Field: A lot of vendors look at schools and say it's only a school, this will be easy compared to a business.
If you go to any one business it can be easy to cover its needs. You can stick a couple of wireless points in one room because Jo and Henry connect to the network three times a day. Whereas in a school you've got video, you've got streaming, you've got the needs of 1300 students in any spot connected all day, every day. So it's a much higher demand in a connected school than in any business.
Mark Pace (director, Sterling IT): The other problem with education is the security aspect. You've got young adults trying to attack the systems.
Nigel Quinn (managing director, Infinite Loop Solutions): They're very good at it - they're the best at it.
Pace: We've worked in an all-girls school and they've got a lot of security challenges. Their male teachers can't even approach the female students because of the Child Protection Act. And students are walking in with USB keys and overriding proxy servers and getting out over the network.
The government schools and the private schools, those different markets are like different businesses. You have to cater for budget constraints from both aspects. And security from one type of education department might be very different to the next.
Quinn: I work with a range, from schools who are very mature [in IT] to schools that have deployed in the last year. The schools' decisions about how they approach security and appropriateness on campus is quite different. In MLC, which has been doing [one-to-one computing] for 13 years, we don't have any security issues there.
It's not because they're in a different socio-economic group or geographic location. It's because the whole school's mindset is past that issue, to the point where it's all about acceptable use, not about blocking.
That's key - if you go down the government's mindset of block everything, two things happen. First, no education happens because you can't actually get to anything, and number two, it gives the kids an incentive to break it. It's a bigger challenge.
We have a responsibility to [teach children to] understand acceptable use and if they leave their Facebook page open to the world what that means. A bit of digital citizenship, that's got to be part of one-to-one programs in schools.
Field: I think schools have to move into that philosophy because again what we're looking at on our table is 11 devices that connect not to MLC's network or any school's network but to their own individual networks.
In the future, unless you're going to frisk every student that comes to school, they're going to have a device that will connect to their own network. So the only way to keep them safe is to teach them how to use those networks responsibly.
If a school goes down the path of blocking and monitoring everything students do, that's very limited.
CRN: You're talking about a philosophical change that is very different to how a lot of corporations work, which is a block and stop type of approach. In teaching this type of a method are you changing the culture 10 years down the track in businesses?
Field: It will have to change. Ask the business guys. If people are being blocked they'll get around it. They will jump through firewalls or they'll bring their own technologies that will connect to their own networks.
And those technologies are becoming more invisible. Kids are now text messaging answers in exams beneath their sleeves. I can imagine soon you'll be able to click a button on your glasses and all the test answers will be up in luminous lights and the teacher will be walking through those answers saying, "Are you cheating?" That's coming at a rapid pace.
It will be the same with businesses. If businesses block everything, people will get to what they want to get to anyway.
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| Westley Field, director of online learning and IT, MLC Girls School |
CRN: So what does this mean for the Federal internet filter?
Field: It's a waste of money. Last time they brought out a filter it took 10 minutes to hack it.
Quinn: It's a rabbit warren, you're continually going down holes that you will never win. It's a no-win situation. It just sounds good for the mums and dads.
Inside the school community, it's not just the kids and teachers that need to be on board [with an acceptable use policy] but the parents and the community. They need to understand why you're doing those things because if it's a new roll out of one-to-one computers the parents will often say, "Hold on - we don't want them accessing this, this and this", because they've heard the press and the press does tend to blow things out of proportion sometimes.
Nigel Quinn, managing director, Infinite Loop Solutions
Paxton: The other issue that demonstrates the difference between business and schools is the range of readiness and expertise for staff. Whereas in a business you might want to set particular benchmarks which have to be met around professional learning. But in a school it's much more difficult to have the resources to do that. We can't say to a staff member, if you can't reach this level of competency, off you go.
Quinn: You'd like to.
Paxton: You may or may not like to but we're there to work with our staff, no matter what level their readiness, and that's a key issue in keeping a particular direction moving with IT. I see that as a key difference and our biggest challenge.
Field: Education is responding [by encouraging] teachers to become partners in learning with the students, so the students take responsibility for their own learning. To me technology is a critical friend to developing that responsibility and self-direction in students. So teachers need to be experts in how to learn and how to push that student through learning, whereas the student can be expert in whatever tool they choose to achieve that learning.
Quinn: We used to be server-based with lots of labs and all the data used to live on the servers. Now we're going to laptops where all the data lives on the laptops.
If we go to iPads that shifts again. And we are - the reality is that's where it's going to head. A lot of educational institutions have said to me, "We're going to get rid of labs and go to laptops so therefore we can change our storage capacities". Well you can't if not too far down the track you're going to move that data back into the cloud somewhere rather than local on a device. So we're in a transitional stage again in education - but we're always in a transitional stage in education when it comes to IT.
That's the challenge, being able to look far enough down the track and see the technologies that are coming, not the technologies that are here now. Schools can't change every day as far as a big rollout is concerned. Schools need to be flexible so that they can change what they want to do within that environment every day - that's the goal of any educational institution, they want to be flexible and dynamic and change all the time.
So you need to have a system that's quite robust. I think that's where a lot of resellers get that wrong, because they don't understand how dynamic and how diverse the need of one department from the next department is, and then again in six months time.
You've got to look at the worst case scenario of [storage] demand and assume that that is normal.
Maurice Famularo (marketing director, D-Link Australia): It's almost a common denominator with technology in schools, that you need some sort of infrastructure in place to support what you currently need in the immediate time frame and understand how that infrastructure could work in two or three years time.
So if you can build something and have that projection for the future, it doesn't have to be a replacement; it can be a redeployment of equipment. For example a core switch, after a period of time when you're ready to take it to the next level, you can deploy those core switches to the edge so you're maintaining that infrastructure and adding to it. It's scalability.
Pace: We've been to a lot of schools where they've had competing vendor equipment we've had to rip out and put it in the bin because there was no scalability. We couldn't put it to the edge because it was in a certain chassis you couldn't physically mount where they wanted to put the equipment. One of the biggest advantages and ROIs schools are facing is putting in equipment that in five or six years time when they need to upgrade they can scale it up or move it to the edge.
CRN: If hardware needs to be replaced so regularly, does it make more sense to lease or rent?
Pace: Just like any business, you've got to look at the finances of the school and how they're spending their money. Leasing is great but it's really dependent on the business.
Quinn: Schools in the past used to have these goalposts where they'd say, "we'll spend this huge chunk of money now and then we'll be right." Well, they're not right anymore. That's the biggest challenge I find with education customers - so we've got heaps of issues, what's the dollar spend to fix it now, how long's that going to last us?
And when you tell them maybe two years, they go, "Hang on, do we have to spend this again in two years' time?" Schools have to understand that this is an ongoing operational cost.
Years ago, it was spend your money, there's your technology, and it lasts for five years. It doesn't anymore. If it lasts for two years you're doing well. And moving schools to a two-year mindset is a bit of a challenge.
Paxton: An ongoing operational cost becomes a strategic cost. In our strategic planning over five years now it's a key building block for how the whole school directs its efforts.
Quinn: And that dovetails with whether you are spending the money or leasing. A lot of the schools I work with buy some, lease some, rent some. It depends if they're an independent school, they're all different depending on where the money comes from.
CRN: Ray, as someone who presumably signs off the cheques on these, what's your reaction to the notion that you're going to be buying kit every two years?
Paxton: One of the first meetings I had in the school was with Simon (Potter, the school's IT manager) about projected costs for the next 10 years around leasing or buying or combinations of both. It's always in your thinking. Finance committees of our board have to look at the whole cost of IT over a really long period of time. It's not how we pay for the IT, it's how we plan for the payment over a significant period of time.
CRN: What control do parents committees have over IT spending?
Paxton: In terms of governance the operational leadership and direction of the school is the headmaster's role. The headmaster briefs the board on the plan for technology which would have been consulted upon.
There would be no veto around that, but there might be some veto around how much it cost because the finance committee of the board has other accountabilities. Staff wages, everything. A cost factor could be questioned and challenged around IT, but not the educational direction of what you're trying to do.
CRN: How successful is Australia at using technology in education?
Paxton: Australia is very first world in the way it delivers learning. You might go to America and have cloud everywhere, but you still have teachers teaching from lecterns. Whereas in Australia and New Zealand there is a wonderful sense of how learning is flexible and the teacher has various roles. We really have potential.
Torre: I totally agree. The technologies are all here in Australia, the speeds are all here, everything is here that we need. It's really the costs associated with taking advantage of the technology itself.
CRN: How big is the bandwidth cost for a school like MLC with a one-to-one program in place?
Field: We're changing models there. We've previously had a limited bandwidth plan and we actually chart it and it changes your thinking. You then limit what the students can do before school, at recess and at lunchtime. You're constantly taking it up and down and looking at where the holidays are coming in and trying to keep right to that level. A lot of energy and time has been spent doing that but we are just about to move to an unlimited plan, which our consultant has sourced for us.
Quinn: Not that we're anywhere near overseas standards but pricing for internet fees has come down dramatically just in the last 12 months. MLC is about to halve what they were paying in their new contract, and it's going to unlimited. That's a big shift recently. It's become a bit more competitive in Australia, but wholesale pricing to Australia is better. We're nowhere near what overseas costs are - we're factors of 10 above what they can get it for in the US and so on. You have to budget for it on an ongoing basis.
Field: It certainly does limit what you can do. Scollaborate is a very high-demand, virtual-world program. We have 70 schools in 12 countries trying to work out how to use virtual worlds for learning. Our participation in that is linked to access via broadband. Whilst we are the world leader in that currently, if we have to constantly struggle on access [it could be a problem]. But American schools don't [have the same issue with expensive broadband].
CRN: What is Scollaborate?
Field: It's a 3D environment; students have avatars that represent them and they meet in virtual islands. It's completely protected, you can't leave the environment or come in if you don't have a police check. It's a very safe environment set up on four sectors of learning - cultural, social action, living or education.
Schools might run a debate with journalists about water issues in Kenya. So they have students from all around the world come on with their own avatars and sit and listen and it's very interactive.
You might ask the American students about water safety and they might say in San Diego it's not a problem, we have plenty of water. The Australian students might say we're having issues because we've been in drought so we can only wash our cars on Tuesday and Thursday.
Whereas the Kenyan kids would say that unless we go out and search for water every day we're going to die. So you get this different global understanding and perspective. But you can't just come in and talk about it. Adults probably could and they would find that really interesting and stimulating but students wouldn't. So how do I run that discussion and maintain the interest of students? And that's the learning. That's about teachers collaborating.
CRN: So you have to limit time on the program because of bandwidth constraints?
Field: We haven't got to the point where it's a problem because it's still so cutting edge that we haven't had many kids going on. But certainly if we had more than 60 - we've run a meeting of all those schools in Sydney a couple of years back, and that was pushing it.
Quinn: We saturated a 100Mbit feed on campus. It was full for three hours.
Field: If you had a school doing 300 then you're in serious trouble.
CRN: Let's look at the trends for front-end technology over the next couple of years. We've heard a lot about projectors and digital whiteboards; what else will we see?
Paxton: Firstly we want what MLC has, which is seamless [use of technology], so we have a situation where it's not an issue for teachers to engage with the technology that we have. We have digital whiteboards; we don't have a videoconferencing centre yet but that's something that's easily achieved. Staff have their laptops, we're wireless in most of the school. We have a lot of the peripherals to do whatever's possible, but it's about it being seamless, and that's my main concern. That it feels natural for teachers to transition in and out of technology, and to keep that balance between the teacher being effective with technology serving them rather than driving the agenda.
CRN: Digital whiteboards - you have them in every classroom?
Potter: All our classrooms are equipped with projectors and sound systems, and 40 percent of classes have interactive whiteboards.
CRN: How are the whiteboards being used by teachers; how comfortable are they with using them?
Paxton: Well the comment I made earlier holds true here. The full range of people who will just not even engage with the switch, may not have a laptop on their desk, to the teachers who might naturally assume that it's going to be part of their lesson every day. The challenge is to move that range of people forward.
CRN: The teachers that do, how do they use whiteboards?
Potter: They would use it as a projector source but also the ability to create interactive and rich teaching resources. We have three camps of teachers within the school. We have those who are very technically advanced - you show them a digital whiteboard and off they go creating content; you have teachers who are just a little unsure about taking that into class; and you have teachers who are definitely not going to touch that, unless they get hands-on personal development or some developmental work. Which is a process we are currently following through with them, a program of personal development for teachers that don't have those skills.
I think that's changing. As we see older teachers move on and newer teachers move into the school they come in with an expectation that equipment is available and they are suitably skilled to use it in the classroom.
That culture change is happening. It's a slow process if we were just to sit back and wait for it to naturally evolve. We are trying to be more hands-on and address the concerns of staff who feel themselves less confident to use those devices.
CRN: Is that a key selling point for a reseller who comes to you, who doesn't just say, "I'll give you a really good deal and support this", but says, "I'll pick up that third camp and take them on board to bring them up to speed"?
Potter: We work quite closely with other Christian Brother schools. We get together and look to purchasing as a group. We don't just look at the dollar amount, we're looking at the value adds we can get from the reseller, whether that's assistance with setting up equipment or integration, that kind of thing. I had a conversation earlier with how Apple has been very hands-on. We have purchased a significant amount of Apple technology and they have been very keen to be onboard to assist us with integration, whether that's personal development for the staff or technical integration. That's been very beneficial for the schools.
We have had teachers who have wanted to integrate [music writing application] GarageBand into their music lessons and they may have not felt very confident with using GarageBand but they know that it's a very useful tool for the classroom. Apple have come out and done free training for any of the teachers that want it. We've tried to focus that personal development not on an Apple person coming out and giving them a sales pitch on GarageBand but someone who has a background in education. So a teacher teaching a teacher, it's more effective.
CRN: What other technology are you looking at buying?
Potter: One of the other reasons we went with Apple was that there were products in the Apple suite we felt were very important for the boys to have exposure to. But also looking at things like more mobile-based technologies, whether iPads or iPods.
Podcasting is a really big thing for us. We don't maintain wikis or blogs for the boys but that's going to come on once we've sorted out some integration issues. That's very important, collaboration and making more use of the web. We've recently moved from a limited to an unlimited model. It's very expensive still.
We were previously on a 65GB a month plan which is nothing these days. Now we are downloading almost 10GB a day. So I'm glad we made that jump because the costs in the additional traffic would have been huge for the school.
Quinn: MLC's previous limit was 400GB a month, and that was being reached all the time. It was only during holiday periods that it dropped under.
CRN: Westley, what about your five year plan?
Field: A difficulty we have in education is teachers being confined to four walls. That's the old industrial model where they owned all the power. Figuratively, literally, we have to break those four walls down.
It's about getting those teachers out to collaborate, to share, to expose what they're doing. You can do that by knocking all the walls down, having team teaching; you can do that by moving them out of the school and making them work in teams, but you can also do that in e-learning. As soon as you expose teachers to other teachers, in any way, they will improve.
So I see a need to move to e-learning to facilitate that collaborative approach to teaching. Schools are going to have issues with staffing, as different online systems come about. They are going to want quality online text materials developed, so they will be stealing the best teachers to develop that.
So you have more and more of a shortage of high-end teachers and you have to upskill your teachers to deliver that online learning, but come up with systems that can manage it.
When students want to do certain subjects in school but the timetable doesn't work, they can't do it. But they can do it if you have an e-learning course where you have a blend between online and face to face and maybe the students can do the science course during the week and meet up with the science teacher either via Skype or videoconferencing.
That mix opens up new opportunities. You can offer more to your student body internally and you can look at different models to move even beyond the school.
CRN: How far off are you from using Skype or other video-conferencing internally?
Field: We use it all the time.
Paxton: How do those courses sell to year 11?
Field: We've got everyone working in their own top subjects to set up the learning. It's not to work on a computer all day; it's to go away, do something, come back and report on it. Our focus this year is to work out what is good online pedagogy. Once we do that with 10 teachers we will then look at a model where some students do one full course online, and that will grow into the future.
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