Robert Pogson

I am the closest thing you will find to an IT professional in my school. Our ISP does have a help-desk far, far away, but most of the teachers here have to go to the office to make a call and the help-desk has office hours, so that is not much help. I did talk to them a few times about error messages saying to call this number… (I thought it was some kind of spam, at first…), and the ISP did provide us with a more or less effective anti-malware system (a great aggravation to all users). We also get a few visits per year by technical people who mainly service the satellite systems and stop at the router. There is a way to integrate the anti-malware with the help-desk but that is awkward.

So, we are alone in the bush. Many schools on a road can get technical help within a few hours or days but very few have a tech in-house. It is just too costly to pay the Maytag Repairman just to keep him around. I have been in schools where itinerant IT visited almost every week but they could never get to the bottom of their “todo” list. Rather than wait for a miracle or outside assistance I have to fix stuff here with no budget and few spare parts.

Fortunately the ISP and Computers for Schools sends us enough stuff we can keep things going. A few key power-supply failures whould finish us for a week or so. I try to put mission-critical stuff on things we have in abundance so I can cannibalize. Fortunately, besides a few power failures, we have had only a couple of systems die with power-supply or motherboard issues.

Almost everything that needed to be fixed was with software, systems running too slowly to be usable (one extremely patient lady was getting five minutes per click…). At first I tried cloning systems that worked reasonably well but it was a lot of work. Our network did not allow in-place cloning as we did not have a server. We now have two servers going but I have found switching to GNU/Linux practically eliminates the need to image over the network. I can use a USB thumb-drive with Clonezilla to convert an XP machine that is acting up to GNU/Linux in minutes. As a result there are very few XP machines left to give us trouble. There are only four still on teachers’ desks and two of those will be converted next week when the year-end paperwork is done or staff are leaving.

Teachers do a lot of volunteer work: extra-curricular stuff with students, activities on evenings and weekends in the gymn, field-trips, preparing snacks, and so on. I do IT. I enjoy it and it makes my job easier and helps others. It would be inefficient to have me hired as an IT person, because my salary is much higher than the typical in-school tech but my IT work is unpaid/not-an-item-on-the-budget so this works. One can argue whether the IT I do is best-practice, good enough or whatever, but I have unique insight into using IT in education so it helps me to speak the language of teachers and to help them use IT effectively in school. At the start of next year every returning teacher and every new-hire will have an IT package outlining the services available and how to access them. We even have installed BugZilla on the server to report problems asynchronously. It’s crude but it works. People can see instantly what problems others have encountered and what the solutions were. This saves a great deal of time and provides some history for my eventual replacement. The server also has a database with our complete inventory and I have scripted some automation of routine tasks. A manual of how the whole thing works and how to manage is also in the works.

We do not have a formal IT plan because so much of what we are able to do is controlled by others: the ISP, funding agencies and bean-counters but we have a general idea to expand IT to every classroom at first with seats at a PC/thin client and to increase access to peripherals like audio, video, still-cameras and scanners. By the end of next year we should have nearly enough PCs to properly implement the curriculum that calls for IT to be integrated into the curriculum and we will find ways to increase peripherals. Bingo is not out of the question. By using the old machines as thin clients of the new machines we should have more than adequate computing power. By using a local cache of the Debian GNU/Linux repository we have in-house backup and installation of software superior to anything we can do with that other OS.

Already we have several teachers who use IT well in class at all levels. The next major goal is to have teachers share their knowledge of how to use IT to permit every student in every classroom to properly use IT to aid learning. That should be achievable in the coming school year because we will organize get-acquainted sessions from the start and IT seminars evening and weekends.