The Perfect IT School

When I started listening to this podcast on 21CL radio and I started thinking about setting up my ideal technology for a new school, I immediately thought about one of my favorite tumblr, "The Setup Wizard" which is the fictional account of the tech support guy at the school from Harry Potter.

Joking aside, I think the first step in expanding the role of technology in the classroom is identify the needs as well as the constraints of your schools technology. It is easy to think of all the things you want to have but even the richest schools have budgets. If you are going to go 1-to-1 with every student using a device every period, do you have the bandwidth to support it? What about the infrastructure? Just because you have WiFi coverage in every classroom doesn't mean you can handle all those devices.

​​ You also need to consider things outside your control. As an international school in China, governmental restrictions to access should be considered when picking apps and platforms. To start, there are a lot of different LMS out there but while many systems take a lot of the work out of setting the LMS up by hosting it on there servers, there is no guarantee that students will always have access to those hosted services. That means using Google Classroom, Edmodo, or Schoology needs to me investigated thoroughly and you have to know that at any moment, access to the service could be discontinued. Self Hosted systems like Moodle can be an answer as they are hosted by your own server and as long as you have access to your website, you will have access to your LMS but require additional understanding of how to set up a web-server and install PHP, mySQL and setup the LMS.

Once the big picture stuff is out of the way, it is important to define what the purpose of technology is in your school and your classrooms. Standardizing how you use technology over the entire school has many benefits. There are many very similar apps for doing the same things. If everyone is using there own, students will get stressed trying to learn the quirks and difference in each. Teachers also have fewer people to turn to to assistance. In the words of the podcast above, try to minimize the "technostress"

To start with, I suggest getting everyone on one LMS platform and picking a small number apps to use. Maybe one app per department. When picking the apps, focus on how they can benefit the objectives of each class. How do they contribute to student learning and engagement?

By starting small and staying focused on student learning, there is a higher chance of technology integration and smaller chance that the devices purchased become paper weights.