CRN Summit: The classroom of 2020

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.