Hello,
We are a Mat of 5 schools and there’s only 3 of us to work between sites which might seem a bit understaff but since it is all working it’s alright so far.
We have implemented current system 2 years ago as we had to move away from window 7 to 10. There were quite a few different ideas to go about it but we focused on centralizing the IT across all sites.
Just before we had to do what we did, we had a main person overseeing IT leave and this is where it could have all gone horribly wrong. The new person that was appointed is a massive Google fanboy, I’ve never seen anyone else getting so much excited for it in my life. Now it’s not a problem of being a fan of it but it is when the ideas this person had were mental. So his proposed idea and what he was aiming for before it was stopped was to go full on cloud solution, getting rid of any server equipment and putting it all away into the magic cloud, great right ? And the icing on the cake was to remove all desktop machines and give every member of staff a Chromebook to replace their equipment with. Yes, every single member of staff, teacher, admin, support and rest. How would you use it like that every day, you might think? A Docking station, yes this ridiculous idea of going back in time where you would plug your computer into a docking station to use external monitor, mice and keyboard. Every classroom, office and literally any room would have a dock to use. We had to argue the case with the CEO to stop it as the head was brainwashed by some Google person who came to visit before.
So what do we have now, well it’s actually a pretty good and solid solution that just works. We have all 5 schools connected together with a dark fibre LAN on the same domain and main site has internet pipe with Internet and firewall filtering solution. We use Microsoft remote desktop for people who want to work offsite or on a mobile device. We do have Chromebooks but as a work device for staff and 1to1 with students. Each classroom still has a desktop machine that had RAM and SSD upgrade. Single account for each person that works on each site, all printers are centralized as well and work on all sites no matter where you are.
We also had to put extra support into teaching people how to use the Chromebooks as the person who wanted these in the first place had different agenda of just selling these and making profit. Ohh how do we know that? Well that was a quick Google search to find that his friend owns a business that buys grey stock devices and sells it cheaper than anyone else could. The problem with this is that those devices are basically crap, break easily and randomly, also warranty is only a year. So we did training sessions and that fixed the outrage of staff absolutely hating these devices. By the way the person in charge of Chromebooks is also a teaching and learning consultant but apart from selling these to the school, didn’t want to do anything else with it. I suppose we’ll have to wait for this person to leave after few years and maybe get someone who likes Microsoft route. We don’t mind Google, the Classroom is pretty good for teachers but anything else is just a load of rubbish. People want to use Word, Excel and Powerpoint not Google version of this that can’t do anything that’s not a basic feature.
And this is why you need to sometimes stand your ground and tell a fanboy with their own agenda to stick it. At the moment we have the best infrastructure we ever had that just works. We also been nominated recently for an award.
Have a nice day.
Thanks
