Hampshire IT (the newly formed EdICT and IT Services) presented their vision for ICT and IT in education. At the forefront, Daniel Fearnley (Business Partner for Children’s and Schools), introduced a Star Wars themed presentation. Think about the date….. May 4th… be with you. For the record, and it is a personal opinion, you would be hard pushed to find more worthy lead persente, however a word of caution, proof of concept is currently being piloted with positive feedback so far.
Myth-busting was the start point of the presentation. Procurement, security and resilience were considered added value of a Hampshire IT partnership, with a subtle emphasis that Hampshire IT operate on a cost neutral business model. New for 2011, there are plans for dedicated account managers for all secondary schools and as an aspiration, all primary schools as well.
The Future
Money and agility innovation were identified as the key variables with schools called upon to create a ‘clampet’ style strategy. Schools need to know the direction they are heading, take account of the impact of ‘money and agility,’ and pull together.
The end goal, anytime, anywhere learning, true collaboration, flexibility and meaningful data, against a back drop of lowering costs, procurement compliance, security, reliability, and of course for IT to just work.
Futureclass Hosted School Service
Schools feedback highlight the need for
- provide appropriate creative tools for learning
- tracking performance of learners through accessible, reliable information
- access to content and information in one place
- intuitive and engaging
- reliability and speed of service
- continuous development
Andrew Martin presented a vision model with the user as the focus, be they (parent / carer, educator, school staff, practitioner or learner) both in and out of the classroom. A single sign-on (SSO) to a portal, leading to the Hosted School Service. A service that may or may not include messaging, Email, cloud ctorage, curriculum software, VLE and MIS. Is this the time to apply pressure for a centrally hosted Moodle service? Underpinning all these services is the HPSN2 infrastructure, again underlining the importance of security and resilience. It was made very clear, it was not the intention of Hampshire IT for this to be a managed service but a partnership.
Benefits
- Automatic updates to software
- Backups of all data
- Modular design, update when and where required permitting swap out IT failure model
- Remote access (mobile and personal device access).
- All hardware and software supported
- Single point of contact
- Smoothing the cost curve
All delivered in a 5 Year, flexible, tailored IT solution.
If you were not able to attend the forum, I hope this post fills in some of the gaps and prompts you to ask the Hampshire IT team some more questions.
More information can be found here.
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