Information Technology Improvement Plan 2022 - 2026
Executive Summary Technology is embedded in education and underpins the management and learning outcomes for students in today’s dynamic learning environment. St Edward’s College technology environment, built on leading software and hardware architecture, supports the College’s innovative and contemporary learning environment. The 2022 - 2026 Information Technology Improvement Plan has been developed to support the goals that underpin the St Edward’s College School Improvement Plan, providing recommendations to support quality teaching and learning and whole school operations. The future of education will continue to embrace technology and through a recent consultation process with stakeholders, gathering of information through surveys and instructor-led sessions, four strategic areas were identified that will lead the planned cultural change transforming the use of technology over the next five years. The four strategic areas are:
Innovation
Education Environment
Embracing cloud services, data analytics, application integration and aggregation of information through dashboards building a student’s learning story
Ensuring the College continues to research and implement leading software applications, improving the management and wellbeing of St Edward’s College community.
Engagement Providing flexible teaching and learning spaces with the purpose of improving student outcomes, technology configurations to meet the flexible and expanding needs of all stakeholders, and convenience when accessing 21st Century learning tools.
Professional Development The capacity to continually learn, adapt and integrate competencies that have been mastered.
Mission Statement St Edward’s clearly articulates in the College Aspiration Statement, our commitment to providing students with a liberating education which inspires them to be compassionate, curious, respectful and autonomous learners. A critical component in delivering a contemporary education which challenges, nurtures and inspires students to reach their potential, is the provision of digital resources and training to enable staff to implement relevant and engaging learning experiences. Experiences that promote respectful and socially-aware use, encouraging students to embrace technology and become productive global digital citizens.
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Context Software Services St Edward’s College ensures the best software tools and services are always innovative and contemporary when acquiring new applications. The Information Technology team have a commitment to seeking the best of breed applications fit for purpose when implementing solutions. The core education application for the College includes Microsoft Office 365 suite: enhancing student engagement by utilising applications such as OneNote, Word, and PowerPoint. Underpinning the digital learning environment is Canvas, providing equitable access and instructional continuity for every student, everywhere and every day. Canvas is a robust digital foundation for all aspects of learning.
The College Student Information System is Iwise, which is pivotal to day-to-day operations. It acts as the main source of storage and distribution of staff, student, and carer information. Iwise is the central hub for exchanging information via API to several core applications including the College financial system; NetSuite, Enrolment system; Funnel, student learning management system - Canvas, and the College user login directory secured by Microsoft Azure Active Directory. Other College applications include Micropay for managing payroll, Adobe Creative Suite and around forty other applications supporting the ever-increasing digital learning landscape. Embracing cloud services, data analytics, application integration and aggregation of information through dashboards building a student’s learning story
Representation of St Edward’s College application data stores and their relationship of data flow between the applications
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Infrastructure
Learning Spaces
Over the years, the College has invested in a distributed datacentre solution to ensure stability, performance, security, and redundancy, providing access to all systems, 365 days of the year. Over the last three years, the College has leveraged solutions offered as Software as a service application; these services are provided by the vendors via cloud hosted datacentres.
St Edward’s College enjoys diverse classroom designs, with numerous classrooms equipped with whiteboards, data projectors, pull down screens and sound, in a traditional layout. Teachers connect to the technology via docking stations providing them the ability to project from their laptop with sound connected to the network, including charging facilities. The traditional classroom setup has a tendency to tether the teacher to the front of the room. It is critical that decisions regarding the future of technology in the classroom is guided by sound pedagogical practice which supports teacher and student engagement in quality learning experiences.
The network underpins all access to the College and internet services. The network is built on a fibre backbone connecting all buildings with redundant paths ensuring reliability. The infrastructure includes server and storage, network core, and wireless devices which are replaced every five years.
Support Services
St Edward’s College ensures all its stakeholders have equitable access to technology and devices, providing access to technology via prescribed devices to both staff and student. Staff are provided with an updated laptop every three years based on teacher need at the time.
Underpinning the technology at St Edward’s College, is a knowledgeable and ever-expanding dynamic team, providing exceptional support to teachers and students. The team offers help-desk support while managing the fleet of student and staff learning devices, along with application and operational support ensuring education systems are available. More importantly, the team facilitates and supports the digital educational needs of all staff and students.
Students are provided access to laptops upon commencing at St Edward’s College, with a replacement provided at the end of Year 9 for their senior years. The laptop program ensures equity within each of the year groups and optimises student opportunity to learn and engage in their education. The devices are funded by a laptop fee, with provision for comprehensive IT helpdesk support. This support program is facilitated by four IT technicians.
St Edward’s College is always looking towards future trends by attending National Conference events and liaising with significant educational partners. Key areas the College will need to invest time in include cyber security, remote learning, cloud computing, data analytics and machine learning. These identified areas will significantly influence how St Edward’s College creates, delivers and communicates information with staff, students and the broader College community.
Technology
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Cyber Security The security of staff, student and carer information stored by St Edward’s College should always be the priority when reviewing systems or applications as a service to be deployed within the College. Adopting the essential eight principles underpins the security for all staff and student devices.
Cloud Services Over the next five years, cloud computing or cloud hosting will be an integral part of St Edward’s College planning. At present, the College has engaged several providers offering their software as a service. A substantial amount of the College’s information currently resides in locally hosted data centres. As Internet access becomes cheaper, St Edward’s College will be able to leverage services from cloud providers enabling the College to host several, or all of their systems in a secure cloud environment. The change to cloud services will allow the College to leverage newer technologies in the marketplace, including data analytics and machine learning.
Remote Learning The next five years will see a trend to more online services enabling students to learn outside the traditional classroom and have access to lessons and information more readily. Learning tools such as Canvas, Education Perfect and Edrolo will become more prevalent in student learning, especially in senior years. These tools will work alongside traditional pedagogy, allowing students to reinforce concepts and ideas that they have learned in the classroom. The hybrid learning model will become more prevalent, and St Edward’s College should always endeavour to source innovative tools to enhance student learning.
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St Edward’s College Key initiatives During the consultation process for the five-year improvement plan, all staff members completed a survey and participated in group discussions on their technology needs in the next five years. From those discussions and surveys there were four key areas identified to ensure we provided an exceptional learning atmosphere and to foster relationships with all our stakeholders, providing a safe and secure learning environment. The four strategic areas are:
Innovation
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Engagement
Education Environment
Professional Development
Innovation: Dashboards and Data Analytics Educational facilities hold a vast array of data, collated over years from staff, students and carers. Information in the future will play an integral role in assisting teachers and carers in their son’s learning journey. Accessing this data assists all stakeholder in identifying students’ strengths and challenges, monitoring wellbeing and pastoral concerns, in addition to creating and recording personal growth and achievements. Dashboards which aggregate information from numerous systems will highlight student, class and cohort trends and will assist stakeholders in achieving the best learning outcomes for student wellbeing and personal growth. Eventually through machine learning and artificial intelligence, dashboards will predict negative or positive trends earlier in the student’s progress in their educational and wellbeing journey.
Recommendations: 1. Continue to build on the Teacher and Pastoral Dashboards 2. Research tools to predict student wellbeing and report outcomes
Innovation: Application Integration As St Edward’s College moves forward into the future, we must ensure that application providers have robust integration or API’s which will allow the College to transfer information freely and readily between systems. Application integration not only allows the College to use best of breed applications but also ensures the integrity and consistency of information across all systems. Integration between applications is essential as we move forward in implementing more cloud services. This should be mandatory when reviewing all new software applications.
Recommendations: 1. Continue to seek Specialised Software solutions 2. Prioritise applications that have robust integration functionality
Innovation: Cloud Services In the next five years, education services will become more abundant from online services, and those services will require greater access to the internet. Like cars on the roads, a single lane can only accommodate a finite number of cars, when there are too many cars trying to access the same road, a traffic jam occurs. The traffic jams can be overcome by adding additional lanes to the road, creating a superhighway. This is the same principle when several users (1000 students and staff) try to access the internet at the same time. We should plan an upgrade to the internet by a factor of 10 based on the future trends for the need of online resources including greater use of video content. This need would require the College to transition from the current service of 1 gigabyte to 10 gigabyte access over the next five years.
Recommendations: 1. Research redundant paths for internet access 2. Plan to upgrade internet access to 10 gigabit by 2027
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Engagement: Transformation of Classrooms The learning environment plays an integral part in how successful or engaged students are. The traditional classroom design, with the teacher’s desk in the front of the room, projector, screen over the top of a white board and students in a row facing the teacher does not meet the needs of a 21st century learner. Recently St Edward’s College transformed a classroom, embracing new design trends, optimising engagement, collaboration and adoption of newer technologies to encourage contemporary teacher practice. Over the next five years, St Edward’s College should invest in redesigning their traditionally styled classrooms. The result will facilitate enhanced teacher freedom and student engagement. Areas of importance identified by staff, would realise benefits in providing flexible teaching and learning spaces, with the purpose of improving student engagement.
Recommendations: 1. Removal of pull-down screens and replace with projection whiteboards 2. Implementation of wireless projection devices 3. Continue to provide teacher charging facilities 4. Upgrade classroom chairs and tables 5. Provide filming facilities for teachers to share and reflect on best teaching practice
Engagement: Staff Devices The staff survey revealed a desire for multiple laptop configurations to meet the flexible and expanding need of some faculties. Staff have expressed the requirements for a tablet style of laptop to allow the use of digital annotation, including the annotation of information for presentation or online comment on assignments. Another requirement is to increase capacity of the laptops to ensure adequate hardware resources to accommodate the needs of specialised software. These faculties include Visual Arts, TAS and music. Increase in screen size, processing power and memory to accommodate needs in current and future applications. From the survey, staff have prioritised the following areas; increased battery life, wireless projection, larger screen and maintain the touch screen. A successful strategy that St Edward’s College adopted is the mode of funding for our technology needs. Technology has been funded via leveraging operational lease. Leasing technology enables St Edward’s College to upgrade devices every three years which ensures teachers have access to the latest tools to perform their important role in the education of students.
Recommendations: 1. Multiple laptop configurations for specialised subject areas 2. Maintain financing laptops for replacement over three years. Ensuring laptops keep up with Software development and dynamic trends in education 3. Maintain touch screens and explore annotation devices
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Engagement: Student Devices Liberating education is one of the key initiatives that underpins the student laptop programme. A significant initiative undertaken by the College laptop programme is to ensure no student is disadvantaged in their learning journey. Every student is provided with an equitable laptop in their junior and senior years. The laptop program ensures that no students are disadvantaged based on their socioeconomic status. Support of the laptop program, provided by an onsite service desk is another important feature, alleviating concerns for parents and students as the laptop is fully supported and maintained by St Edward’s College. Over the next five years, it’s important that the College continues to embrace the existing philosophy, which fosters improved learning outcomes for all students. An area identified by staff requiring additional research and development is the delivery and use of digital textbooks. This was clear from the survey results; digital textbooks are not meeting staff expectations.
Recommendations: 1. Continue with school supplied and supported laptops to ensure equity 2. Review requirements for junior and senior laptops. 3. Create more opportunities for students to charge laptops on campus 4. Research ways to deliver digital textbooks
Engagement: Helpdesk St Edward’s College is fortunate to have a dedicated and dynamic on-site team of IT staff that provides high-level support in a vastly expanding educational setting. The success of the department stems from the diversity of knowledge that the IT staff bring together from their past experiences. As the College advances through its digital evolution, each year more and more devices are introduced to our network and circulate throughout the College with the introduction of the student laptop program. As the number of student devices increases, the demand for support rises alongside. This consistent and growing need for support significantly detracts the IT staff’s attention away from the ever-increasing list of projects. With the increasing demands and ever-changing technological landscape, ongoing annual professional development for IT staff is imperative. Attending relevant conferences or seminars provides IT staff with new ways to sharpen their skills and keep abreast of the latest technological standards within the educational sector. These opportunities also allow for the building of relationships with other professionals and IT staff, particularly within the EREA network. By providing opportunities for professional development, St Edward’s College is investing in their IT staff by strengthening the backbone of the IT department.
Recommendations: 1. Invest in a new helpdesk officer to alleviate the increasing demands on the current team. 2. Position helpdesk centrally within the College campus 3. Continue to provide comprehensive support to all stakeholders 4. Formalise and plan annual professional development for IT staff
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Education Environment Software applications enhance management of several areas of the College including student learning, administration, student reporting, community contact etc. Recently the implementation of Canvas has had a profound effect on student learning which was highlighted in the recent staff survey. Staff were asked how often they access applications each day. Diagram 1 (right) ranks the College service/application by importance. As shown the most important applications and services for staff are access to internet services for resources and content, Iwise, student information system and Canvas. It should be recognised there are several applications that are core to the management and administration of the College with a smaller user base. NetSuite, the College Finance system and Micropay, play major roles in managing College finances. Enrolments, managed by Funnel, allows for Student online application processing and parent engagement. Both systems integrating with Iwise ensures best practice in all areas of the College.
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Accessing the Internet iWise Canvas Microsoft Word Microsoft PowerPoint ESS Education Perfect Microsoft OneNote ReadCloud Adobe Creative Cloud Edrolo Google Classroom
Diagram 1: College service/application ranked by importance.
Education Environment: iWise Student information systems (SIS) underpin several critical student management processes and Iwise has been identified by all staff as the most used application in the College. Accessed daily by staff, there are several important features that are critical in the effective management of students. These include student and parent demographic information, absenteeism, academic reports, timetable, Markbook, merit system, timeout, Pastoral Care notes and enrolments. St Edward’s College staff identified the following areas as strengths in the application; timetable, Markbook and the integration to academic reports, academic reporting and roll marking as a strength area. Areas Iwise is lacking in are: communicating to parents, managing student behaviours (timeout and merits) and the wellbeing of the student (Pastoral Care). Iwise is the source of truth of stakeholder information and the transfer for that information (Name, email etc) to several College systems through Application Programming Interface (API) and application scripting. These include Canvas, Netsuite, Active Directory, O365, Google, Education Perfect and Adobe. The information replicated from Iwise underpins student, parent and staff access and security to College systems. There are concerns about the developmental future of Iwise. Maintenance and support has been guaranteed from Civica and there has been no official communication from Civica that Iwise will be decommissioned in the future. Moving forward, St Edward’s College should assemble a small team, with members from senior leadership, enrolments, technical and teaching staff to review Iwise functionality, and complete a Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Treats (SWOT) analysis with the outcome to investigate other SIS that meet the future needs of the College.
Recommendations: 1. Secure maintenance and support agreement for 2022-2025 from Civica 2. Assemble small team to review Iwise functionality (SWOT) 3. Document application dependencies (API integrations) 4. Canvas market and review potential systems.
Education Environment: Canvas Canvas was identified by staff as the most successful initiative over the past couple years and rated in the top three applications used by staff and students daily. Canvas is now embedded in the teaching and learning agenda of the College. Survey results on staff proficiency were very high in several areas of Canvas. Staff are very comfortable in navigating Canvas, with a high percentage also proficient in creation and modification of content and using speed grader. There were several comments from staff requesting ongoing professional development in Canvas to realise its full potential. Areas that need to be addressed: integration to SIS Markbook, student calendars and parent access for reporting, in addition to reviewing of Blueprints. Recommendations: 1. Greater integration with student information System 2. Explore options for continuous student reporting 3. Whole School Adoption
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Education Environment: Application integration St Edward’s College should continue to seek software application that develop robust integration (API’s) which will allow the transfer of information freely and readily between systems. Application integration allows the College to adopt specialised applications and ensures the integrity and consistency of information across all systems. Integration between applications is important as we move forward in implementing more cloud services and should be mandatory when reviewing all new software applications.
Recommendations: 1. Continue to implement applications that are specialised to a process. Ie Payroll. 2. Prioritise applications that have robust integration functionality.
Professional Development Staff and students will be lifelong learners. The capacity to continually learn, adapt and integrate skills in their academic endeavours or future employment will be critical to their success. St Edward’s College needs to ensure that staff and students are kept informed of the latest software and tools, it is critical they have instructive IT training at point of need and competencies are mastered. Structured ongoing professional development should be integrated in the project design when implementing new systems or applications. A comprehensive Professional Learning program would be developed by the Director of Professional Learning and Information Technology Team, consisting of: • • • • • •
Face to face workshop sessions Online training modules Follow up de-briefing and reflection sessions PD videos and resources able to be accessed by staff anytime Evaluation and feedback surveys to monitor usage, competency levels, and identify further PD planning End of year (or other determined time period) evaluation of this process by all stakeholders to plan next stage of development and training of this system/resource.
Allocation of resources for this program would require significant investment in time for teaching staff. Any new IT purchases must have this expense costed into the initial purchase price, otherwise we are not realising optimum value for the College’s investment.
Recommendations: 1. Strengthen partnership between Director of Professional Development and Information Technology Team. 2. Creation of mastery training modules for applications and on-going training 3. Structure planning and training when implementing new applications or change in process
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Projects Timeline The diagram below outlines key projects planned for 2022-2027 and will be reviewed annually.
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