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I’ve just been watching a video case study I thought was worth sharing, of Liberty University, in the US, who have been using the Dynamics CRM system to manage their student lifecycle - from recruitment, to their time on campus, and then through to alumni.
It’s interesting to hear the university staff talk about the student lifecycle, for example - how they are able to manage students at-risk of dropping out - by tracking interactions and their academic progress, and to then intervene before there are issues that get worse. They also talk about how they are able to present the right profile of the university to students, to match their interests and goals.
There’s more info, and case studies, of Dynamics CRM use in education, on the main Microsoft website
One question that I’m asked frequently about new projects is:
“Who else is doing this?”
In some cases, what people (partners/customers) are looking for is confirmation that they’re going to be at the innovative edge - and that what they are doing hasn’t been done before. And other times, they are looking for reassurance that somebody else has taken the journey before them.
So I thought that I’d try and collate a list of public case studies and examples from within Australia, which will help answer the question. What’s interesting to note is that there are some areas where there have been lots of case studies published, and yet others where there have been few or none (despite the fact I know of examples, they just haven’t been published anywhere that I can find).
Even though the list below isn’t exhaustive, there’s a fair number of education case studies from Australian education institutions - both Microsoft published case studies, as well as those published in the media and by our partners.
If you pop your mouse over each of the links, you’ll see a few more details on each of the examples.
Case Study Subject
Schools
TAFE & Vocational
Higher Education
Dynamics CRM
Box Hill TAFE
Australian Technical College
Tennis Australia
Curtin University
Melbourne Business School
Business Intelligence
Brisbane Catholic Education John Paul College
William Angliss Institute of TAFE
UNSW Macquarie University University of Canberra
SharePoint
Marist College Catholic Education Office Paramatta Drummond Memorial Public School
Abbotsleigh
Cranbrook School
John Septimus Roe
Australian Institute of Fitness
Education websites built on SharePoint
Abbotsleigh School Trinity Grammar School Brisbane Catholic Education John Paul College Hale School
Gordon Institute of TAFE Bendigo TAFE
Australian School of Business
Lync for unified communications
Tasmanian Polytechnic
Scotch College
Windows Azure - Cloud case studies
NSW DEC ESSA tests
Curtin University - 1 Curtin University - 2 Curtin University video
Virtualisation
St Leonards College
University of Canberra
Office 2010
Luther College Prince Alfred College Varsity College Immanuel College
Our Lady of the Sacred Heart College
NSW DEC
Live@edu
Redlands School Prince Alfred College Brisbane Catholic Education Prospect High School
South Australia TAFEs Western Australia TAFEs
Office 365 for education
Others…
St Margaret’s (IAG)
Dallas Primary School (Kodu)
Lakelands School (Photostory)
Proserpine State High School (Songsmith)
Peter Moye School (Windows 7)
Miller Technology High School (AutoCollage)
If you know of other case studies, let me know and I can add them to this page for others to see and read. It doesn’t need to be formally published information like an article or case study - it could be a story told in a newsletter or other place - as long as it’s in the public domain on the web.
Continuing the month’s worth of ideas to support a New Year Resolution to cut paper use in education…
For a break I thought you’d like some ideas that don’t come from me. Instead, I thought it’s worth highlighting ideas from Chris Wejr, a school Principal for Kent elementary school in Canada. He’s written on his blog about the way that his school uses technology to connect with parents. As well as being full of ideas that would help to cut down on paper use in school, it actually helps to increase the level of connection with parents. His tips include a list of ways that they connect to parents in his school:
This is a pretty impressive list for a single elementary school to have achieved. And almost all of them can be done at no additional cost.
You can read Chris’s blog post in full here
I keep an eye on the ‘Office in Education’ blog, which is run by the team that create Microsoft Office over in the States. If you’ve got a list of blogs you read through an RSS reader, it’s worth adding their RSS feed to keep in touch with their news and ideas. For an idea of the kind of content they publish, here’s a list of their 10 most popular blog posts:
There are 11 different Office blogs from the main team - including one for each of the main products in the Office suite
In November the Australian Productivity Commission produced a draft report on the Schools Workforce in Australia. It’s a draft because they are looking for comments and feedback by the middle of February. I’ve only recently had time to read it, and I thought I’d share a quick summary, because it’s (a) interesting and (b) a draft that they want comments on.
The report emphasised that overall, Australia’s schools deliver good outcomes, due in large measure to the efforts of the schools workforce. Global assessments of student performance consistently show that the foundation skills of the ‘average’ Australian student are at the upper end of the country rankings, whilst spending is around average. However, performance in international tests has been reducing, relative to other countries, since the beginning of the century.
Looking forward, DEEWR are projecting that in the next decade we’ll see student numbers in Australia rise by nearly a million students - an increase of 26% on the 2010 numbers. That growth is especially strong in Queensland and WA, where it’s forecast to be 40%+. Put that alongside the likely reduction in the number of teachers, caused by more teachers retiring than joining the profession, and there’s a challenge coming up.
The Productivity Commission was asked to look into the whole education and training workforce, across early childhood development, schools and VET (Vocational Education and Training) sectors, and provide advice for the short, medium and long-term - especially around building the capability and effectiveness of the workforce.
There’s a list of a seven draft recommendations, starting on page XXXV - or page 39 if you’re reading the electronic version
Why, in these days of PDF publishing, would you use a numbering system that starts with 39 pages numbered in the historic Roman numbering system, and then re-starts at page 1, on the 40th page of the document?).
The recommendations include:
I was interested to read the full report because of two specific issues:
The Australian teacher shortage I’d been referring to the future teacher shortage a few times recently, but had only grasped it in the sense of the current system - with the current number of students. If we’re expecting a shortage based on today’s student body, then things are going to be far worse if the shortage is actually going to be made worse by a 25% increase in the number of students! And this will become a greater issue in states like WA where they’re expecting 40% more students in the next decade. Either we need a lot more teachers*, or a more fundamental review of how teaching and learning take place (ooh, there’s the technology angle) Improving access and evaluation of data on student outcomes Although there are some exceptions, one of the things that I’ve noticed with the Australian education system is that it doesn’t automatically use data to help support improvements in student performance in the same way that other education systems do. I noticed it before I arrived in Australia, when looking at the MySchool website. It was good to see all of the performance data for a school in one place, but I was surprised by the limitations it imposed on people using the data, which seemed to fly in the face of what most parents would want the data for. And in spending more time with Australian educators, I’ve been surprised by the number of times that they’ve been forced to work without a simple but comprehensive view of student performance data - for their own students, or to compare their students against national performance. It seems that the key point where really good public data is available is at the point of leaving High School, when it’s too late for schools to do anything with it that will impact the performance of the students that are the subject it! The proposed review of how ACARA and AITSL contribute to improving access to data could be a significant step forward on this, to help schools better serve their whole student cohort, and help them tackle educational disadvantage too.
I’d been referring to the future teacher shortage a few times recently, but had only grasped it in the sense of the current system - with the current number of students. If we’re expecting a shortage based on today’s student body, then things are going to be far worse if the shortage is actually going to be made worse by a 25% increase in the number of students! And this will become a greater issue in states like WA where they’re expecting 40% more students in the next decade.
Either we need a lot more teachers*, or a more fundamental review of how teaching and learning take place (ooh, there’s the technology angle)
Although there are some exceptions, one of the things that I’ve noticed with the Australian education system is that it doesn’t automatically use data to help support improvements in student performance in the same way that other education systems do. I noticed it before I arrived in Australia, when looking at the MySchool website. It was good to see all of the performance data for a school in one place, but I was surprised by the limitations it imposed on people using the data, which seemed to fly in the face of what most parents would want the data for. And in spending more time with Australian educators, I’ve been surprised by the number of times that they’ve been forced to work without a simple but comprehensive view of student performance data - for their own students, or to compare their students against national performance. It seems that the key point where really good public data is available is at the point of leaving High School, when it’s too late for schools to do anything with it that will impact the performance of the students that are the subject it!
The proposed review of how ACARA and AITSL contribute to improving access to data could be a significant step forward on this, to help schools better serve their whole student cohort, and help them tackle educational disadvantage too.
You can download the full Schools Workforce draft report from the Productivity Commission website. If you want to make a submission to the consultation, then you can do that on the same page, until 17 February.
* If you’re one of the teachers in England who reads this blog, perhaps there’s a ‘Get Yeself Down Under’ message here! And you could do a lot worse than the beautiful landscapes of Western Australia or Queensland
Kinect - it’s amazing to think what one small sensor could do for teaching and learning. Yesterday I wrote about the education pricing for Kinect for Windows that’s due later in the year, and mentioned some examples of how it might be used in schools, TAFEs and universities. And I also mentioned the KinectEDucation website, which is a community of developers and teachers who are working on projects to use Kinect in education.
For some more ideas, take a look at the video, from the KinectEDucation team, with some more inspiring scenarios:
I am one of the latest of the 18 million people who’ve bought a Kinect sensor for my Xbox (one of the Microsoft CES announcements - the 18m number, not the fact that I’m a user)
It seems I’m a laggard when it comes to gaming and home entertainment technology, having only just setup my Xbox and bought a Kinect this Christmas. The two things I’ve discovered and never used before, is the voice control feature, and the ABC iView app on my Xbox, which means that we can now watch catch-up TV on our TV, rather than having to watch it on a laptop computer. So over the holiday the whole family have become re-addicted to Spooks. I feel silly not having set this up before, because I’d thought of it as a gaming box, rather than a home entertainment system.
Anyway, just as I’m catching up with Kinect on the Xbox, the world has shifted again with the CES announcement of Kinect for Windows. From the outside, the sensor looks the same, and works in the same way, giving you control over your computer via your hand and body movements, but unlike the Xbox version, it’s now optimised for close-up use - from 50cm away rather than having to stand a couple of metres away. That means that it will allow people to use Kinect while they are sitting in front of a desktop setup.
What we’ve announced is that this new Kinect sensor hardware and software will be available from the 1st February, and it’s been priced at AU$299. The even better news is that later this year there will also be special education pricing for Kinect for Windows, bringing the price down (I don't have an Australian price yet, but in the US it's planned to come down to $149). You can read all the details on the Kinect for Windows blog here.
Because Kinect is able to do full body tracking, and now has it’s new ‘near’ mode, I can imagine a heap of scenarios that it will be useful for in education:
With the education pricing for Kinect around the corner, I guess the KinectEDucation community is going to get even busier in the near future, with teachers and developers collaborating on new teaching and learning ideas for Kinect.
Looking at other sources of paper use around the school, then there’s an obvious opportunity to get rid of paper forms used internally. The obvious benefits of this aren’t restricted to saving paper, time and money - it also can help you to make your internal processes and communication much smoother, and more accurate and efficient.
Yesterday’s example from Alan Richards, of removing paper from the Academic Review process at West Hatch High School, was a first step in a longer set of steps that Alan took in his paperless school project. The next obvious candidate for moving off paper and onto the school’s SharePoint was what Alan calls the ‘Training form’ – a request by staff to go on a course. As Alan said at the time:
The plan is to do the same for all commonly used forms. And as Alan points out, the whole “paperless school” initiative isn’t just about the cost of paper and printing. It makes for a more efficiently-run and cost-effective school. There’s improved collaboration both within the school and between home and school, together with better administration and easier access to useful data. As Alan explains:
The intent of the idea was to remove the paper, but the end result goes much wider - removing manual processes and improving communication. The process makes it easier for teachers, because they have much better visibility of what’s going on and where a request might be in the process, as well as being able to make an absence request online without needing to find the paper form.
You can read more details on Alan’s project in an original blog post I wrote in late 2010, as well as on Alan's Edutechnow blog.
School IT budgets will come under pressure, as the DER programme reaches it’s zenith, and overall spending on education continues to be in flux. Although we’ve now reached the point of every Year 9-12 student having a laptop, there’s still plenty of schools where the teachers and students don’t have access to IT whenever they want.
And yet students and teachers now have better and cheaper technology at home than ever before. A spot check of the average 15 year-old’s school bag is likely to reveal a heady mix of smartphones, laptops, games consoles, iPods, cameras, and more power packs and cables than your average branch of Harvey Norman.
It’s therefore not surprising that schools are wondering whether these two trends can be combined. Is it really possible to allow students and staff to be productive in school, using technology they’ve brought in themselves? Can the school save money buying or replacing hardware, by utilising the devices which have often been banned from the network? Will staff and students actually work harder and be more engaged in their learning and teaching, if it’s all happening on a device which they enjoy using? Or is the idea of “Bring Your Own Device” nothing more than a headache for school IT staff, a massive security risk, and a fad based largely on the principal being in love with their new iPad?
Two of my UK-colleagues Mark Reynolds and Tim Bush have recently been talking about the issues/opportunities created when students have their own IT devices - and how one English school - saltash.net - accommodates them through their school network. I’ll let them pick up the story from their original blog post:
saltash.net is a fantastic school down in Cornwall where head teacher Isobel Bryce has built a strong platform for her staff and students to succeed. Their most famous son is Dan Roberts, whose Recharge the Battery project won a Microsoft Innovative Teacher award in 2009. We spoke with Adam Ledger, the schools Network Manager. Adam explains their approach to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD):
“Our network has about 300 fixed desktops and 300 netbooks. We also have about 100 teacher laptops, which are vanilla windows and 30 Macs in a suite for Media. So we’ve got about 700 school owned and managed devices, but in total have over 1,700 devices which have joined the network.”
The 1,000+ “unmanaged” devices are a huge range of laptops, netbooks, smartphones, iPads, iPods, Kindles, Nintendos and anything else which staff or students want to bring in. To be honest, I nearly fell of my chair at this point, because although I’d been to many schools who allowed guest wireless access of some kind, I’d never come across anything on this scale. Adam explains that Saltash.net has always had this approach, ever since students started asking:
“Trust always is the starting point. Trust the kids and they will reward you with good behaviour. We say yes to everything, as long as they come and ask us. I can only think of 3 or 4 instances of misuse of the system, and one of those was a member of staff. I know we are lucky with the kids and that it might not work in every school, but it works for us. We enable access on peoples on devices which they WANT to use, and so we have happy customers. They know we can block or remove access if we need to, but they value the trust we put on them and they’re glad to be learning in a way that suits them.”
So from a technical point of view, how do they keep it secure and manage the process?
“If you want to bring in your personal device, you bring it to see us (the IT team). We register their mac address, version of anti-virus, make and model, and the serial number of the device. We then use the software that comes with our wireless network to enable that mac address in a whitelist. The same software we use for whitelisting can also do the blocking by mac address (blacklisting) – which it does for any “unknown” mac address, or for any device that needs to be banned from the system. We also periodically then clean out the DHCP databases, and run a very short lease on the IP address given to a wireless device. We want people to have freedom of access, but also want to know what’s on our network.”
And that, really, is that. They give wireless access to devices they know about and they block anything they don’t. It is then down to the teaching staff to manage the way students use those devices when they are in school. That is one for Dan Roberts to explain, which we’ll do in another blog post. Just walking round the school though, that feeling of trust and mutual respect is noticeable. I can only assume that the same respect students have for their teachers, they have for the freedom they are allowed when it comes to technology. They’re enjoying their learning, and feel able to use the technology that suits them.
Microsoft is planning to make the management of BYOD networks much easier, with the launch of System Centre 2012. Not only will System Centre offer the best possible management of your existing Windows network, but it will also offer support for management of iOS and Android devices too. There is a public beta available already, which you can read about and download here.
Although many schools are already doing this, there are plenty that still provide parental reports on paper. And don’t want to change, because they feel that it’s key for parents to get a paper copy of their children’s report. As a parent, I still like getting the report on a piece of paper. However, I think my mind is changing, as plenty of other systems go online. For example, I now get all of my utility bills, my phone bill and my bank statements online. And the benefit to me is that I can quickly jump back and see any of the historically, rather than having to look for old paper copies (most of which, I haven’t kept filed neatly). Imagine if I could go back and read all of my children’s school reports, save my own copies, and print them out when I needed them.
A school report is one of those documents that parents keep for a long time - but how about taking a step forward by providing a parent with a school report as a PDF document too? So that they can share the report with grandparents online (especially relevant in today’s non-nuclear society).
And perhaps, if parents find the PDF version beneficial, you’ll be able to make the paper version optional?
One school that’s making a determined run for “paperless” status is West Hatch High School in the UK. There, Alan Richards, Information Systems Manager, and his team have put the technology to work in a way that saves costs and improves efficiency right now, and opens up even more possibilities for the future. The key is to transform paper forms into truly interactive documents on the school’s SharePoint Learning Gateway. The starting point was to tackle the extensive paperwork supporting the school’s Academic Review Days. There are two Academic Review Days each year, for which staff collaboratively prepare two documents for each student– a Progress Review, and a Target Setting Document. Both are two pages long which makes four pages, twice a year, for each of 1,300 students. So moving the whole process online saves printing 10,400 sheets of paper each year. How it works is that the Target Setting document for each student is agreed by teachers, parents and students individually at the academic review day meetings. Previously a paper exercise, it’s now done on an interactive InfoPath form on SharePoint. Each student, with their parents and a teacher, works on a laptop to come up with a set of targets. When they’re all agreed, the teacher presses “submit” and the final version goes off by email to the parents and to the student.
You don’t have to go all the way that Alan’s done at West Hatch. If you just simply emailed a copy of the finished report to parents when you send the paper copy home, you are starting the process of changing. Let’s face it, you’ve already got the electronic copy, and parents will value being able to have it electronically to share with relatives. So why not? (It’s a ten second operation to hit ‘Save to PDF’ in Word 2010, and most report-writing software already produces a finished email-able format).
There’s a further benefit. As you start collecting up-to-date parental email addresses, you’ll also have them handy for every time you’re tempted to send out other pieces of paper.
If you want to learn more about Alan’s Paperless School project, then you can read more on his Edutechnow blog, and I’d highly recommend listening to the recording of his Cost Cutting using SharePoint webinar.