What do your staff really want?

[AngryTechnician]

Since starting at a new school last year it's become apparent that there is a huge scope for improvement in IT provision here. I knew this was the case to a certain extent when I interviewed, and it was part of what attracted me to the post. Nevertheless, I'm at the point where I will need to start putting my budget proposal together soon (our budget year runs from September, so no, I'm not late!). While I have a bunch of ideas about what to do, I know it can't be a complete list of the possibilities, it probably won't match up exactly with what the teachers want, and of course there's a snowball's chance in hell that I'll be given the money to do everything.

To address this, I am thinking about doing some formal research with teachers at my school about their current use of ICT, what benefits they personally see from their ICT use, what the barriers exist that prevent them from using it more, and what improvements they think would benefit T&L most. My thinking at this point is to run a couple of focus groups with volunteers from different parts of the school, analyse the results to identify themes, and follow up with a whole-school survey.

Has anyone done anything like this before in their school, or knows of similar studies? I'd be very interested to hear what sort of consultation other schools do with their teaching staff as in my last school we did very little because IT development was heavily driven by SMT. I'm also interested in how you do it (sit-down discussion, surveys, ask for suggestions by email, informal ad-hoc chats, etc)

[nephilim]

we did this, the main answer was new laptops and projectors. They were satisfied with everything else. So we ordered the laptops, shoved W7 on them, ordered projectors and bulbs and everyone is now happy!

[jcollings]

We do this on a regular basis. We basically ask staff to give us an indication of all their ICT wishes, this can be anything they see improving T&L/Admin including IWB, projectors, laptops, netbooks, software, staff development etc. etc.

All of these things go onto a school wide "wish list" and the IT strategy group look at how much money we have to spend annually and prioritise the list. Obviously that is a simplification of our process and much dialogue happens.

The other thing we do is publish the costed wishlist and are totally transparent about how & why something sits in the list where it does. Of course all this is tied into the schools wider development plan. It seems to hit the mark for staff and works well here.

[Andrew_C]

What I get asked for on a regular basis:-

Quick log-on
Reliable
Reliable printing - OK, I know!
Their old software to work on it. (Win95 - still shows how maths works)
No scaling problems between wide-screen monitors and 4:3 projectors