What is going to be the next 'Big Thing' in educational IT?

[Duranis]

I would love to see technology being used to really create engaging, memorable educational content. Things like VR could be amazing. Learning about Victorian London, put on the VR headsets and go and explore it in person. See something in there that you want to discuss in class, send a model of it to the 3D printer. Being able to actually "experience" things rather than just read about them in a book/website I think would get kids a lot more interested in things that they normally don't care too much about.

 

Sadly this is not likely to happen, deployment cost would be too high, teachers would need to really embrace the technology and be well supported, not to mention people would have to develop educational software that wasn't complete trash.

 

Like most of you I see a lot more moving to the cloud and online services happening.

[synaesthesia]

I think the whole "cloud" thing needs scaling back a bit. Not quite reliable enough yet, too many points of failure and no control or easy backup when something does go wrong. A few years ago we'd be moaning at people if they didn't have a backup lesson plan if anything local didn't quite work as it should, yet now it's expected, and the ICT support staff are still held responsible should something go belly-up out of our control. Need to concentrate on education rather than silly buzzwords like "cloud".

[crc-ict]

Next big thing?

 

Full cloud migration, bring your own devices (maybe even bring your own connection with emerging 4G etc???) and the extinction of on-site technical staff?

 

I very much hope I am wrong, but with finances going the way they are going, I can see it coming all to easily.

Edited February 23, 2016 by crc-ict

[3s-gtech]

It's not surprising that so many of you see cloud services becoming more important. It certainly makes sense in many regards, but I'm just not ready to offload services to another provider. The ongoing costs may work out to be similar, with subscriptions versus maintenance costs of hardware, licenses etc, but I just like holding the keys to my data. Maybe I'm a dinosaur. We do run our own cloud services, hosted in-house though.

 

Another advance I'd like to see is some great innovation that reduces the amount of printing and photocopying that is done. We've been promised this for years - ooh projectors will do it, IWBs will do it, tablets will do it! Nope. Just getting worse. We do need to change attitudes as well as throwing technology at it, and Papercut has helped but can only do so much.

[Andrew_C]

Another advance I'd like to see is some great innovation that reduces the amount of printing and photocopying that is done.

Maybe we just need to accept that paper is here to stay? Can be easily annotated, filed, taken home, revised from WITHOUT a "device" being on with all the distraction entailed, it doesn't crash, sustainable, can be used as firelighters come the apocalypse...

[3s-gtech]

It has its place, but boy do we print some old junk too!

[dblight]

extinction of on-site technical staff?

 

The "Cloud" has been a horrible term for many years. Everyone just says oh "The Cloud" however we have been doing it for years in a basic form. Web Hosting is a prime example. Some choose to externally host but it still needs to be maintained. I used to be very sceptical of "The Cloud" (I despise the term) but actually its all seeming to make a little sense.

 

Azure will be a big thing for us this year and probably the coming years. We are a Multi Academy Trust now thats only going to get bigger. For us placing some infrastructure in Azure is how we will probably scale it out. IMO someone still needs to be able to manage Azure from within our organisation. 1st/2nd line techs will still be needed to deal with people walking through the door on a minute/hour/daily basis. Someone will still be needed to sorted out how Azure is configured and what services are used etc etc.

 

We are using Azure AD currently. Not in any great big way but its still in use with our O365 tenants. It still needs to be tweaked and looked after.

 

I suppose my point is that "The Cloud" term has been banded around so loosely for so long many in the IT industry fear it without actually fully knowing or wanting to know its benefits/negatives. I'm personally on the line currently. As I say its been mentioned in our place and it'll be me that it will come to for implementation....... For the moment I think I shall just embrace it and see what happens.

Edited February 23, 2016 by dblight

[twin--turbo]

Cloud does not have a silver lining.

 

One of our software vendors wanted us to move to their cloud platform, only 6K per year. What does it cost us to run this in house for the business section? well effectively £0 , as it's one VM out of 100 others and those others provide for other areas of the business to a much greater degree.

[sonofsanta]

I don't get all this talk of The Cloud. What has Little Chef's free wifi got to do with anything?

 

 

I don't think this'll be the next big thing, but at some point I'd love to see ad-hoc tablet networks, so a class of thirty could collaborate and share resources among each other intuitively, with a teacher's tablet acting as master. Swipe some content to the tablet you're sat next to, walk over to the next student, pull something over, then push it up to the board, run through it there, then push it out to everyone... would need an awareness of every device's physical position and orientation, but could be incredibly intuitive, which is always the stumbling block for technology in schools.

[Gibson335]

'server rooms' will be a relic of history. It will be 3-5 yrs and it will be cost effective to run offsite. If server/electricity costs come down dramatically it will be sooner. Why did IBM want to exit the server market and MS/Google/Amazon enter it ?

 

Failure to see that the internet/infrastructure is the way forward is a huge failure of Senior teams (and network mangers for not pressing the point).

 

Example: how much do pay HLTA's, your MS agreement, Capita etc. vs the internet/infrastructure. I'd go for the latter.

 

With CAD/CAM development now doing quite well in the cloud, the last one to really nail down is a cloud-based equivalent to Cubase or ProTools.

[CyberNerd]

I don't think this'll be the next big thing, but at some point I'd love to see ad-hoc tablet networks, so a class of thirty could collaborate and share resources among each other intuitively, with a teacher's tablet acting as master. Swipe some content to the tablet you're sat next to, walk over to the next student, pull something over, then push it up to the board, run through it there, then push it out to everyone... would need an awareness of every device's physical position and orientation, but could be incredibly intuitive, which is always the stumbling block for technology in schools.

 

Interesting because some of the cloud based IWB products (smaprt-amp, realtime board) have this sort of ad-hoc netowrk at the heart of how resources are shared, as does classroom. Just without the swipe/orientation aspects!

 

With CAD/CAM development now doing quite well in the cloud, the last one to really nail down is a cloud-based equivalent to Cubase or ProTools.

 

yeah - not very long ago we were told you could not program or do ICT on chromebooks because they were cloud based! it didn't take long for that to change.

 

Full cloud migration, bring your own devices (maybe even bring your own connection with emerging 4G etc???) and the extinction of on-site technical staff?

 

It just means your job role changes a bit. It's actually quite refreshing, instead of scripting on our own server I'm doing the same sort of stuff on Google's. Others on this forum have had similar experiences with Azure. And lets face it - getting a job in future is going to be a lot easier if you have documented experience of running HTML apps and cloud based systems than some near obsolete technology.

[StoneGroup_Community]

The "Cloud" has been a horrible term for many years. Everyone just says oh "The Cloud" however we have been doing it for years in a basic form. Web Hosting is a prime example. Some choose to externally host but it still needs to be maintained. I used to be very sceptical of "The Cloud" (I despise the term) but actually its all seeming to make a little sense.

 

Azure will be a big thing for us this year and probably the coming years. We are a Multi Academy Trust now thats only going to get bigger. For us placing some infrastructure in Azure is how we will probably scale it out. IMO someone still needs to be able to manage Azure from within our organisation. 1st/2nd line techs will still be needed to deal with people walking through the door on a minute/hour/daily basis. Someone will still be needed to sorted out how Azure is configured and what services are used etc etc.

 

We are using Azure AD currently. Not in any great big way but its still in use with our O365 tenants. It still needs to be tweaked and looked after.

 

I suppose my point is that "The Cloud" term has been banded around so loosely for so long many in the IT industry fear it without actually fully knowing or wanting to know its benefits/negatives. I'm personally on the line currently. As I say its been mentioned in our place and it'll be me that it will come to for implementation....... For the moment I think I shall just embrace it and see what happens.

 

Might be worth you checking out our upcoming webinar on Stone Unity, a new solution for MATs we have developed using pretty cool blend of converged storage, Azure, EMS and other cool stuff.

 

We have some strong support from Microsoft and there's a free Linx tablet for taking part. More info and the webinar link at Stone Unity.

[StoneGroup_Community]

Been a really cool thread guys.

,

If anyone is interesting in hearing Chris' star turn, you can view that podcast episode on Soundcloud, iTunes, Tune In and Stitcher. It's episode #004.

[dblight]

Existing MATS merging with other MATS to create bigger MATS will be a big thing. With that goes projects/planning and collaborating on future IT projects on a bigger scale.