Information Technology Services

MR CHAU CHUC, HEAD OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.

John F Kennedy

The resilience and future readiness of Fairholme’s IT infrastructure and IT services were put to the test this year during the COVID-19 pandemic. IT ably adapted to changing demands and operating conditions. At short notice, our infrastructure and IT support allowed Fairholme students and staff to cope with the transition from a traditional face-to-face educational environment to online. The infrastructure and services allowed flexibility and agility to utilise alternative platforms when specific platforms were not available or could not cope with the increased load.

Teachers were supported and had a choice of platforms to cater for their preferred pedagogy and students. Online learning platforms including myFairholme, Microsoft 365 (Teams, Onenote, Sharepoint, Microsoft Stream) and Zoom.

Live streaming using Microsoft Stream, Teams, Zoom and Youtube allowed the Fairholme community to keep in contact and involved whilst staying in compliance with mandated COVID-19 restrictions. Internally, these included live streaming of Assemblies, Chapel services and House meetings. Externally, these included classroom lessons, music lessons, Presenting Fairholme, Year 12 Final Assembly, Year 12 Formal walk-in and staff meetings.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated our online strategies, particularly using technology to cope with online learning and our workforce. We took actions to adapt College policies and deliver services online out of urgent necessity, but in the process, have brought in changes that promise future benefits.

With COVID-19 restrictions lifting, there is one aspect of education that stands out and is unlikely to ever be replaced in the P-12 learning environment, and that is the importance of friendly face-to-face learning to support our students.

This was the second year that Fairholme has had a one gigabit per second internet connection. It was critical to our success for online learning and video live streaming.

The Fairholme College Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/ fairholmecollege) continues to be a vehicle for the Fairholme community to keep in touch. It has grown to 6117 followers, with an average weekly reach of 12,000 (how many times a post was viewed per week).

The Fairholme Laptop Program has been upgraded to the Dell Latitude 3310 Series laptops with toughened glass touch screens. Like all our previous Dell laptops purchased for student use, these were purposedesigned to meet student handling and needs in the full range of subjects on offer.

Fairholme College’s IT Helpdesk and in-house systems engineering and administering continue to meet demands of an educational environment. Listed below are some facts and figures for the technically minded. Email and Internet Traffic: • Average number of emails sent and received per month: 325,000 • Average number of blocked incoming emails (spam or infected) per month: 181,000 • Average volume of data downloaded from the internet per month: 13TB

Helpdesk Services: • Average number of Helpdesk jobs per month (separate from laptop services): 2,600 • Average number of battery swapand-go services per day: 22 • Average laptop and hardware services per month (free technical support such as data recovery, insurance claims or warranty claims): 260 Software infrastructure includes: • Adobe Creative Cloud 2020 • Adobe CS 6 Master Collection • Checkpoint (Firewall) • EVA Check In • Exchange 2016 • Exchange Online • Family Zone (Internet Management Platform) • Freshdesk (helpdesk software) • Hyper-V (server virtualisation) • myFairholme (4th year of deployment) • Office 2016 Professional Plus • Office 365 • Reach Boarding • Remote Desktop Gateway • Single Sign On • Sophos (antivirus) • Synergetic (school management software) • Windows 10 Education (64 bit) • Windows Server 2019 • Zoom