Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Creating 'Community' for ICT Support Staff

I had a thought provoking conversation with Rob Barugh on Friday.

Rob was talking about how he values the sense of 'Community' within the scope of some ICT Conferences and how a shared sense of purpose is important.

That triggered some serious self contemplation on the value I have for community and how it fits into the overall self value of anyone in a specialised field.  I've spent a lot of time contemplating why my sense of 'Community' within the school faded over the twelve years I worked there but grew with other ICT Professionals over the years.

I think it's the feeling of shared challenge and achievement we feel when we gather as a community.

Within the school, the acknowledgement of achievement by the ICT team was very limited.  There was in fact, normally, no acknowledgement for what we were achieving with very limited resources and wasn't valued or in any way worth taking about.  The classroom challenges for teachers were shared in the staff room and acknowledged at staff meetings and in public forums at every opportunity. 

Within ICT community gatherings (normally at conferences or PD opportunities) we all got an opportunity to acknowledge each other's efforts and converse about them.  This served to increase our sense of worth and community.

It's been spoken about for many years; there needs to be more opportunity for the growth of community of ICT staff in schools.  There are State based collaborative areas and some of these are quite strong with the AISNSW group as a great example of how this can be achieved.  Unfortunately we still don't have a national group supporting this community. 

Fortunately I am now in a position to expend some effort on building the platform for that community.  I wonder what it should look like and how it can be curated to be of value as well as capture the strengths of community.  Any suggestions and comment would be gratefully accepted but I will make something interesting happen.

Monday, March 30, 2015

Why Cloud deployments are not the answer for ICT in schools

It's apparent that 'Cloud' has impacted significantly on the development of school's ICT. 

However, this isn't necessarily happening in the way vendors had hoped.  The adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS) has been huge across the board with everything from Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps for Education to Mathletics and web based learning solutions to the innumerable iPad apps with web back ends.

The thing that seems to be missing at the moment is a similar focus on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS).  In the immortal words of Professor Julius Sumner-Miller, "Why is this so?".  Some schools have deployed IaaS, most commonly a Back Up as a Service solution or some virtualised machines in data centres; these services seem to have had much more traction in the commercial space. 

Why have schools not adopted this?  This is a very important question for many vendors as they see IaaS as a large opportunity for sales growth into the school sector.  However some very significant issues will hamper sales of these infrastructure services into the school sector.

Single site

Most schools exist as a single site. There won't be many companies with IT infrastructure the size and complexity of a school who exist on a single site.  The value of having an IaaS cloud solution is multiplied many times when you operate a diverse multi site environment.  In a single site the cloud solution means the school is totally dependent upon their Internet connection.  This could mean significant extra cost in having a second link to remove the single point of failure.  The main effect of this is when looking at the benefits of cloud we immediately remove some of the most significant positives and increase the negatives.

There are a few schools who are not single site and the organisations representing multiple schools such as Catholic Education Office and Swan Christian Education Association which are not limited by this concern.

Of course the other consideration is we do have significant access needs for parents and students from of campus which is improved by cloud technologies.

Lack of a cost benefit

Significant numbers of schools have adopted Virtualisation at a higher rate than other industries.  The immediate benefits of Virtualisation is important to schools with significant hardware and support cost savings. Now many of us are on our third generation of virtualised servers and have no interest in losing those savings.  This means when we are comparing the costs of IaaS solutions to our current environment there are normally no savings available and often the cloud based solution is costing more with little obvious benefit.

There are schools still moving down the virtualisation path. They will benefit from moving direct to IaaS.

Hiring patterns

Most schools went through an expansion of their ICT support teams in the period up until 2012.  As a result of this timing most of the Manager/Directors with technical backgrounds came into schools prior to the widespread adoption of cloud.  This means most senior technical staff come from their previous environments with no experience in deploying IaaS, this doesn't mean they're not sure of cloud or doubt it is going to rule the future, it just means we are going to need to be convinced of the real value and security of IaaS.

Bad experiences

Although not widespread there have been pioneers who tried IaaS solutions or even as we did PaaS as part of older projects.  We were trialling a PaaS solution in 2007 but we ended up leaving the trial due to the providers of that service not understanding that taking the service down for updates in week 4 of term 1 would be detrimental to uptake within the school.  When updates were applied to the servers which bought the system down for an extended period and the provider was quite comfortable that they had no need to provide us with an assurance they would not repeat the exercise we decided that we couldn't continue with that risk.

The result is that in 2007 we started to virtualise our environment and continued to prefer the option of controlling our own schedule of updates and patches.

Summary

To summarise my post - The 'Cloud' in particular IaaS is not the answer to any school's IT problems.  We (schools) are not looking for a quick solution to problems which don't exist.  We're looking to make every dollar we spend deliver the best value possible.  At the moment a tenancy in a very expensive data centre doesn't deliver any savings.  We're looking and waiting for the technology to deliver savings for us.  What vendors don't want to understand is; we don't care that much about your profits, and we won't necessarily sign up for whatever is "trendy". 

Saturday, March 21, 2015

Protecting the kids

I believe the most important issue with school mandated 1:1 Technology programs is Student Protection.

If you've been following the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse you know that the passage of time will judge harshly anyone not monitoring and working to make children as safe as possible.  I have seen some attitudes to monitoring student activity on their school mandated technology which leads me to believe in 20 years time we could be watching a Royal Commission into the Institutional Responses to online protection of students. 

My first concern is that school leadership don't fully understand the risks for there to be significant harm delivered by a device mandated or even provided by the school. 

The security of the corporate grade firewall we maintain at school may not even pick up on the patterns and sites which are part of activity and could be of harm to students.  Even worse, those limited protections may not even be there when the device leaves the campus and is used for web browsing at home. 

I have seen many schools with great products deployed to make sure students using their device are always under the watchful eye of child protection software which is being developed and updated constantly to fulfil only one purpose, to make every effort to keep students safe.  The decision to abrogate that responsibility to parents is almost certainly flawed.   We have seen over the last few months students leaving their home country to join extremist organisations and their parents apparently not aware of their radicalisation.  

I worry greatly about the first time a school mandated device is used in the grooming of a young person into a radical movement.  I particularly worry because there are far more important problems the student protection software can help with identifying.  I have seen first hand the ability to use this software to identify and potentially intervene in the circumstance where a student is displaying suicidal tendencies.  There are far more students in need of support than there are those likely to become radicalised.  It's my belief that all parents would gladly pay almost anything for the device to have that protection built in.

I know some schools believe students need to be exposed to some risks and taught how to manage those risks.  I believe this is a risk you should be very clear in discussing with your entire community and ensure they're buying in to the premise of allowing that risk; they also need to be well informed on all aspects of that risk.

Legislative Solution

Student protection has been looked at by many companies with strong solutions available which will work in the background on just about any device.  I believe this type of software should be compulsory on any student device.  It should be mandated that devices used by students, if mandated or even proposed by schools, should be required to meet certain child safety standards. In this case Government has not kept up with the risks.  When the Federal Government instituted the NSSCF it was fantastic to see the acknowledgement that students having 1:1 access to technology was essential in the 21st century.  Unfortunately, at no stage was the impact of take home technology considered as being dangerous for children.

  

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

The Internal Salesperson

One of the most important roles we take on as the ICT Manager is the job of 'Internal Salesperson'.

When you're presented with an idea, technology, option, and/or proposal that you can see would be of value to your school, you have to be able to 'sell' it to the appropriate person.  This skill is probably the most undervalued and untrained skill expected of you.  You often don't even know this is what is expected, you just have a feeling someone should be told.

How do you become that 'Internal Salesperson'?  We all have most of the skills needed to be able to sell ideas to your Leadership when they need to be involved in the decision.  There are several things to consider as part of your preparation present an idea.

Sanity Check

The first stage of working out the value of a proposition is a quick sanity check with a knowledgeable party.  At one stage I'd seen a fantastic presentation at a Conference I thought would be great for adding some extra data into assessments.  I went to our Dean of Studies with the idea and found out they had been doing something similar using our current database.  This quick 'sanity check' saved me wasting time on further investigation.

How should I present the idea?

The next question is critical to the internal sales effort.  How much effort you put in to the presentation will be at least partially driven by your 'passion' for the proposition. I always tried to figure out the most appropriate person to work out the proposition with.  For instance when I was trying to get approval for print management I had the CFO and Director of Staff and Services involved.  When we were looking at new hardware to work with scientific sensors the Head of Science had to be the co-sponsor of the proposal.  In this way an effective sales pitch will already have some traction before you try to sell it to the Principal.

I'd always start to write the proposal out.  This helps you consolidate the idea into your environment and work through potential issues.  I would do this even when it will only be presented verbally as I find the writing process focusses my mind and I will quite often identify potential issues or even unexpected benefits during my writing.

A very long time ago I had 12 months purely writing strategic papers.  This experience helps me produce reasonably succinct but very dry proposals which all seem to work in my favour when presenting technology proposals to Principals and Leadership teams.

A piece of advice in preparing presentations is highlight risk in the proposal, not only for the execution of the proposal but if there is risk in not adopting it.  It seems there is a limited understanding of risk within School Leadership particularly around technology.  You'll need to use your expertise to highlight not only financial and operational risk but issues such as privacy, copyright and child protection.

How can I sell technology ideas to the Curriculum areas?

Sometimes you can't, but if you can see the technical/operational benefits you should try.  It's a great starting point if you can get input from someone within the Curriculum delivery area to make sure the idea has merit and can fit within their classroom practice. 

I always tried to allow for consideration of other options when the technology was directly for the classroom.  An example; each time we were looking for upgraded display technology I would have determined there was a need and had a demonstration of something which interested me.  However, there was always several options open to us, so the consultative process was critical and my sales pitch included multiple options.       

You are the expert!

This is always the concerning part and the piece of the puzzle that needs you to maintain your self confidence.  You have been empowered by the school to be the expert, don't be afraid to be a advocate for what you see as the best solution.

Sunday, March 15, 2015

The Loneliness of the School ICT Manager

The last 12 months has been a bit of a revelation to me.  Since leaving All Saints' I've talked to school ICT Managers across the board in schools ranging from the large rapidly growing schools to the medium sized school which is shrinking and the small school not changing too much.

I now realise how fortunate I was being able to obtain the funding I needed to keep the infrastructure up to a Corporate standard.  Many schools battle for any amount of funding for ICT even though it is now expected that ICT will be critical in delivering curriculum. 

When Managers in schools are forced to keep inappropriate technology operational even though they're operating end point counts higher than you would see in any IT environment in medium - large business.  You need to look at the Corporate or Government sector to see more than 1000 concurrent users in an IT environment but that's normal in the larger schools.  Even small K-12 schools with 400 - 500 end points are not inconsequential. 

One of the challenges is school executives expect ICT will just work like it does at home with very low funding level.  If you search the Internet for information about technology in schools you will find thousands of articles from educators and for educators, however, there are very few for the technical person working in the support of the classroom technology. 

Some companies take it more seriously and will publish information targeting the IT Manager, one example is an excellent blog post by Brett North from Computelec "Measuring up to the Mythical Man" which is no longer available but still relevant.  However, there are, from my experience, very few peer generated resources for those working at the coal face providing technical support for classroom use of ICT.

I have always felt frustration around that short coming in the fact there are fragmented groups around Australia but no opportunity for a group large enough to be a 'go to' for all those involved in ICT technical support in Education.  This makes it quite a lonely life being a person looking for resources supporting the case for change/improvement for infrastructure and support options.

Saturday, March 14, 2015

Finally I understand

I've been trying to figure out what it is about BYOD for schools that rubs me the wrong way; but I think I've finally figured out the problem.

Many schools have tried to change the terminology to BYOT (BYO Technology), BYOOD (BYO Other Device), BYOX (x being an unknown) and just about any other letter with a prefix of BYO.

I think the problem isn't in the last letter, it is in the O which we know stands for Own.  Why would we ever consider ownership as important.  My experience shows that most students consider a device their 'own' as soon as they personalise it.  As soon as the background on their PC is customised it is their 'own'  device.  Another problem with calling it the students 'own' device is most students up until they enter senior school would simply have a device as determined by their parents.  When they are empowered to make that decision it will most likely be whatever is trendy with their peers.

So in schools it would mostly be BYPD (Bring Your Parents Device) and that is fine.

I would like schools to label their personal technology programs as BYLD programs and move the focus from ownership to purpose.  What is BYLD?  It's Bring Your Learning Device.  I think this would place the focus squarely on learning and make everyone in the process become focused on learning not on any side issues which are at best distractions.

If you do run a true program where you don't offer any guidance for parents as to the type of device which should be bought in to your school then BYOD is fine because you're not even specifying the purpose of the device.  If you have any other style of program it should be a BYLD program and you are therefore trying to improve learning with a device of some sort.