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Over the years, we have advised many schools on their IT, so we know that all school environments are unique in their make-up and requirements. What we have learnt when it comes to device programs is that the device is really the last thing to discuss. You need to start by considering objectives, timelines, stakeholder buy-in and pedagogy before you can form a strategy to ensure the technology will be firmly embedded into the curriculum. When it finally comes down to choosing the device, the options can be overwhelming to some, so we approach this conversation in a consultative fashion.

During my time as a teacher, Head of Teaching & Learning and ICT Education Specialist, I have come across schools who have successfully implemented new technologies into the classroom, as well as those that have been less successful. From this, I know that it all begins with the approach. In the case of Office 365, [...]

During my time as a teacher, Head of Teaching & Learning and ICT Education Specialist, I have come across schools who have successfully implemented new technologies into the classroom, as well as those that have been less successful. From this, I know that it all begins with the approach. In the case of Office 365, I have seen schools implementing it simply for the OneDrive storage. While this is a useful feature, some schools just aren’t aware of the many other features which create supportive and collaborative learning environments, nor considered the importance of supporting teachers with classroom application and the pedagogy behind using Office 365.

Ok, so SharePoint 2016 is still a while away, in fact it’s currently slated for release sometime mid next year (Q2 2016), However there have been a lot of recent discussions around its features and capabilities as well heated discussions about on-premises v’s cloud. Most schools who decided to be early adopters of SharePoint 2016 will start the planning and project early in 2016 (Feb / March) or even later this year. While not a project to be tackled lightly, the benefits are huge and well worth the effort.

It is staggering the number of teachers and educational leaders that comment how frustrated they are in the lack of educational change taking place, despite the 21st Century Learning mantra. And I get it. We are talking a lot, but it feels like not a great deal is happening. Perhaps this is because while educational leaders share a common understanding of the importance of change, innovation and preparing students for the ‘real-world’, there isn’t a clear cut way of leading this agenda within our schools in a way that impacts directly on student outcomes. To go along with this, some feel completely ham-strung by change in government policy, curriculum frameworks and the standardised testing agenda. This massively influences the way teachers design assessment, often to the detriment of learning to such end that is has been referred to as the ‘silent killer of learning’. So who’s got a bullet proof vest?

Innovation and constant change have been key features of ICT for decades but schools have not always been early adopters of trends that have emerged in other public and private sector enterprise environments. One of the fastest growing areas of ICT development and deployment at the moment is cloud computing, so here are some thoughts on how cloud computing concepts can be utilised in education technology environments.

I'm frequently brought in to Schools to consult and work as a cloud architect and I've recently run into problems getting school staff to engage with cloud adoption projects. Thinking back, this has actually happened for quite a number of years and while it’s not as prevalent as it used to be, I've found myself trying to sell the cloud not to our customers, but to the engineers, consultants and internal IT staff who seem to think it would do them out of a job or reduce their ownership and power in their own environments.

Creating a sandbox test environment with BackupExec and Veeam by Richard Warren, Senior Systems Engineer at Computelec In this series of two posts, I will run you through my processes and experience in creating a sandbox test environment with Backup Exec and Veeam. This came about because we are currently in the process of [...]

In summary, WAN acceleration is a very effective way to get more efficiency and speed from your existing WAN links. After WAN Acceleration alone, we have seen schools gain up to 10X increase in through put.While we have only shown two scenarios in this post, there are many other ways to optimise your school’s network. If you have any questions about the above or School Networking in general, please get in touch!

VMware vSphere 6.0 - What's New: by Andrew Lancaster, Systems Engineer at Computelec Now that VMware vSphere 6 has been released I'm sure some of you may be thinking you should go download and install it over lunch, so over the next few weeks and months I’ll be going through the new features of [...]