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now reliably access the applications, documents and peripherals they need,” says Allen. Because of this, the assistant head and his team plan to extend the virtualisation system out to the junior school of 350 students and 40 staff.
TAKING THE TABLETS Riding on the coattails of these successful infrastructure projects, the school’s next big plan is to introduce iPads to all its pupils. “We spent the last couple of years looking at different options and in some ways we probably focused, at some stages, too much on the ‘what’ and not the ‘why’,” Allen explains. “We’ve come round full circle and are now clear on the reasons why.” He continues: “We looked at other alternatives but they didn’t offer enough in terms of the whole experience that we wanted.” As an independent school, King Edward is planning to make buying an iPad a uniform requirement for all new pupils starting in 2014. That gives the school a year to get staff trained and deal with what Allen calls the “changing educational paradigm” that needs to happen first. Because the introduction of the virtualisation system went so well, Allen is feeling confident about the new technology deployment. While some IT departments balk at the word ‘iPad’, worried
it will be difficult to programme centrally, King Edward had the opposite experience. “We were quite keen to go down the Windows 8 route, but the IT department were against that, which is quite ironic because we are a Windows-based school,” he says. “Basically they felt there was too much to configure and they felt the Windows 8 experience wouldn’t have been as consistent an experience. The boundaries aren’t as clearly cut – with the iPad; you know what you can do and what you can’t do.” Furthermore, Allen points to a large amount of positive evidence coming from places like the USA and Australia around the use of iPads in schools. “Sometime we’ll have to change,” he admits. “At some point in the future it won’t be the iPad – might not even be Windows, might not be Google, might be something else we don’t even know about.”
CHALLENGES AHEAD Allen has already encountered some resistance to the iPad rollout from teaching staff. While most teachers want them for teaching now, the concerns expressed appear to be about the functionality of iPads – as production devices, file management, etc. Over the next year, the school plans to work with teaching staff to get them ready, while also preparing for the technical and procedural challenges like how to distribute the apps for the students. The future will also be about rethinking how classes are
taught, structurally, and exploring the different pedagogical avenues opened up by tablet use. “It will be quite interesting to see how the change affects what we do in terms of teachers and their expectations because teachers expect to be the sage at the front,” says Allen. “The idea of – and I don’t like the term – ‘the flipped classroom’ is an interesting concept for a school that is fairly traditional.” What lies at the heart of everything Allen and his team do is
ensuring a standard quality of user experience. “I don’t think the iPads are as important, as such, but I think we felt it was important to have a consistent device as opposed to a total bring-your-own-device [free for all],” he says. King Edward’s IT department’s biggest challenge to achieving this uniformity seems to be in instigating a cultural shift that digresses slightly away from the school’s traditional values. “That’s our biggest challenge,” Allen agrees. “It’s how we deal with education in terms of keeping the best of what we already have but bringing the best of the opportunities it presents.”
september 2013 \
www.edexec.co.uk
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