IT Challenges Within School Districts

School districts deal with many challenges everyday, from how to ensure that no child is left behind, to budget issues, to managing teachers and controlling costs. These challenges also fall into the Information Technology category as how to maintain their infrastructure and use technology in the best possible way for the district. Having a number of family members that work, have worked, and are looking at starting their careers in this field, I am continually curious about how schools are using technology today, and how can they better use technology in the future.

I recently came across an article put together by HP and IDG (International Data Group) that talks about how schools districts are struggling to use technology to their advantage, and that of how districts can reduce costs by implementing more industry standards across the network. Having spoken to family and friends that work with school districts, this seems to be the number one complaint. The district does not have standards in place from school to school, facility to facility or even teacher to teacher. I have personally walked into classrooms where one teacher has a dinosaur for a computer while the next classroom over has a brand new computer. I can understand some discrepancies, but not to the extent that I have seen.

Another area is how the districts change software to their needs taking away features, etc. Thus producing an environment where installed software from two different computers might not work the same. What is frustrating for me is when I try to help my friends and relatives. I have been supporting end users for over 20 years, and I am very familiar with how to do many common office software tasks, navigating around the OS, etc. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to walk someone through a situation, and they tell you that when they press "x" key they are not getting the same results as I see on my computer, even though I am using the same OS or same office version as they have installed on their computer.

These variations from standards only hinders the end users and slows down progress within the schools by not allowing the end user to bring to work their knowledge of how a particular program should work. Take for example Word by Microsoft. If the teacher goes home and can create the document there with ease and they are familiar with how to navigate through the menus to obtain the result that they are looking for, and then they cannot use this knowledge in the classroom because things work differently there, this is a huge gap. This is avoidable by installing the standard features of the Microsoft Office product onto all the computers the same.

I have also seen issues with tech support offered in the school districts. I work for a company where when I have an issue with my computer, I can call the help desk and the person assisting me can assess my computer from a remote location and see what I see, and duplicate the issues and then repair the problem. When I talk to family and friends that work for different school districts, they tell me that one of the challenges is being available when tech support finally has an opportunity to show up at the school. Therefore, a teacher has to wait until someone can come live to the site and take care of a simple issue. Where is tech support? Why does the district not have someone dedicated to just end user support that has the capability to remote onto these computers to resolve problems? One issue has been infrastructure.

Infrastructure is a huge reason that districts are not able to function, as they needed. The schools have not invested the monies into ensuring that their network is one that will allow central computing. This wastes a lot of time and energy, and reduces the sharing of information and resources. One simple example of shared resources that has the potential to save the district monies year after year would be to implement a terminal server for access to expensive software. In a small district, the likelihood that all 300 teachers would need access to Microsoft Word or Excel is rather low. Chances are that the district could most likely get by with say 75 to 90 licenses. Therefore, by purchasing less licenses the district will save monies and the teachers can still have access to the programs that they need.

A special consideration is needed for personnel that move from school to school and that would need access to information when working from home has the ability to utilize files and resources. I have one relative that often is in need of writing reports from home, and the system in which files are stored on her computer has a tendency of losing the files more often then keeping them safe, this results is time and energy lost.

Upgrading the technology being used, and maintain real world standards will help districts reduce costs while also reducing the frustrations of those working at the district. Providing proper training so that the teachers can use the technology can also help to reduce costs. I have found it interesting that teachers are very resilient to change in terms of learning more about how different software packages can help to produce greater efficiencies. One would think quite the opposite of teachers, but I have found that most use the phrase' "I know how to use this application to obtain this result, and that is all I need to know." Even though there might be a better or easier way using a different program. I just wish I could have used that excuse when I was in school... "I know how to get from here to there with the tools I have today... I don't need more information or different tools." I think my teachers would have looked at me as being crazy, if only they would take a step back and listen to their own excuses.

http://www.idgdocuments.com/idgwhitepapers/HP_TDos_BOC_k12_0623i/?u1=texterity&cookies=1