CRN Summit: The classroom of 2020

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.

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.