£24m School Can't Get Its WiFi Working
Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 9:01PM The Times reports that: that:
The head of the £24 million Bristol Brunel Academy — a beacon of Labour’s Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme — said that its wireless system had yet to work properly and teachers still did the register on paper because of problems with swipe cards
Incompetence on an epic scale.
In my school, we aim to lose no more than five teaching hours per school year to computer failure. The last couple of years have been less than three.
some heads, particularly those involved with the BSF programme complain that they have lost freedom over their IT budgets, and are forced to buy expensive equipment through designated suppliers
This is a huge issue. Overpriced, underpowered hardware on long inflexible contracts coupled with fashion-led purchasing (interactive whiteboards, fingerprint scanners).
Let's not even get started on GLOW, Scotland's nationwide Microsoft SharePoint deployment.
Delivering yesterday's technology tomorrow.
Reader Comments (2)
Perhaps it is an overly broad statement, but my experience has been that the skills IT professionals in schools are mediocre at best. I know there are exceptions, but most IT staff in schools are poorly trained, overly cautious, and lacking in vision. Randomly select a school in your area, and I guarantee you'll find poorly configured servers, computer systems so locked-down that they are unusable by average school personnel, and networks so walled off as to be inaccessible from anywhere other than in the physical confines of the school building. I'm not sure why this is, but I suspect it is related to the need for proper IT admin training that is specific to the needs of educational environments.
I genuinely liked this sentence: "We aim to lose no more than five teaching hours per school year to computer failure". What a great metric to measure results! Do you do any reporting on this metric?
I believe goals (and metrics) like that is the way to go for environments where IT support core business, but is not an actual revenue generator. Would love to know more about how you set goals and measure success in your school.