Author : Rob Abbey, SCECGS REDLANDS, Sydney
Publication : May 2005 Issue, The Education Technology Guide
The first step in developing properly structured IT systems for your school is knowing what you need the systems to do.

There is a range of questions that keep a school executive awake at 3:00 am:

• Are we fulfilling our duty of care to parents, students and staff?
•  Are we achieving our potential in administration, attracting new students and running this school properly?
•  Are we communicating well with the many groups of people involved in a school?
•  How do we cope with the enormous need for technology?
•  How do we get real value out of the technology within the school?
•  How do we know that the students and staff are fulfilling their roles?
•  Do we know where the kids are at any time of the day?
•  How do we cope with the changed culture of our students that we really find quite foreign?

Are we doing the right thing by students and parents? Can we find out what we need to know in order to learn and assess situations? How do we find that piece of paper that contains important information? Can we capture the information that Sally wrote last year before she left? How do we get all the information for registration?

Our need to know requires vast amounts of information on enrolments, student performance, staff performance, parents, student welfare, student whereabouts, casual staff, future enrolments, academic syllabi, outcomes, reporting, student testing, attendance records, medical records, staff timetables, staff replacements: the list is endless! Then there is the pedagogical thinking related to class room management, units of work, web sites, lesson plans and the endless documents that schools create and lose. At the heart of these questions and needs is communication. So how can we ensure effective access to the right information at the right time for the right people? How do we communicate in schools that often have multiple campuses, disparate staff rooms, casual staff, many laptops, different laptops, etc?

These days, these questions and a thousand others are serviced by information systems as there is just so much data required to be managed and accessed. The systems have to be built according to a logical hierarchy that has to be attended to in order. Administration systems are the core foundation for other systems such as learning systems and gifted and talented programs that can build on the prior layers. This is because the functions of enrolments, collection of student data, and access to normal school administration are the basis for collection and management of other data. It is possible to build systems that are integrated, i.e. use common data and approaches or utilise disparate systems that don't really integrate well, or maybe require different platforms. Many schools have legacy investments that dictate the continued use of different systems and frequently staff work towards integration.

On top of everything else, we need the skills of specialists. Not only the obvious teaching and learning based competencies, but schools need IT specialists, management, and organisational skills spread though all levels of the school making a complex and creative organisation.

These pieces of the jigsaw don't just happen. They have to be grown, hired or self taught in many ways. My school, a co-educational private school, faced huge challenges when it found its IT systems not sustainable and seriously not supporting the needs of the school. We knew that we had to economically find solutions that were coherent, comprehensive and sustainable for a future that is certain only in the fact that it will be different than what we know now; and the solutions had to be able to be implemented quickly.

We saw many systems that dealt well with certain aspects. Some completed academic reports, some did administration, some learning, some online-learning, others did timetabling. Most did administration/ student records very well but had no growth path for architected web access or learning management. Few completed these tasks in an integrated manner, with sustainable web based architecture securely accessible from home. Fewer completed these tasks in a way that could be configured to our needs. Fewer still were local companies who understood outcomes and NSW particulars. We wanted an outsourced development service that was able to understand and meet our administration needs, our communication, our reporting and our learning requirements. We needed a system that would fit and support a learning community and grow with us as we grew in knowledge and understanding. We wanted a partner who would take the trouble to understand what was unique to us and what was common to any school and provide for both sides of our needs. Further, it was completely clear that the traditional cycle of analysis, requirements and development would take many months and not be ready for use for that sort of period. This implied a software platform with all the core functions built-in, that would enable us to achieve the urgent needs while allowing time for development of the less immediately urgent but just as important particular needs of our school.

After a phone discussion with the developers of Edumate, where all the right things were said, my interest was suddenly engaged. I had seen other IT managers saying what we wanted simply could not be done in terms of outsourcing, integrating, web architecting, securing, building for schools, and expendability. After further evaluation and extensive discussion we could see that here was a unique product and a creative designer with a very strong technical grounding. This was an emerging program that had enormous promise for schools. If it delivered we were going to gain enormous advantages over the next three or four years. Edumate promised to deliver on school administration, academic reporting and billing in a fast track project.

Edumate is a complex product and it is important to start slowly and add new functions when and where people are ready. We needed to start with administrative records as a basis for academic reports then add billing soon after. It was decided to take years K to 7 using three individual formats for the Prep, Junior and Middle School. These formats varied in their use of outcomes and required much planning and training. The first time with any new initiative is always a learning exercise and mistakes will be made. We had to learn how to accurately enter comments manually, and work through outcomes based reporting and marks based grading. The following semester added Years 8 to 12, five more report formats, and more learning about a new marks book, the grading requirements of both HSC style mark, and marking and grading.

We are learning how to enter marks just-in-time and have them applied to the academic reports automatically. Teachers can now access their work from home.

We have found that the size of our school pushed the performance limits of Edumate and we are pleased with the performance we now see arriving in Edumate2. This year has seen us expand into timetable generation using Edval, and with its export to Edumate2 we will see tremendous gains as we progress to the second term of use for the 2006 timetable.

We are just beginning to see the real added value of the rich and powerful tools such as the controlled online access to medical, academic and personal data for urgent or normal needs; the use of forums for educational discussions is obvious but powerful. We have yet to utilise email and calendar management, but look forward to the collaboration and sharing made possible through these integrated tools whose administration is largely 'set and forget'.

In the next implementation phase we will learn how to provide controlled access to students and parents so that they can use email, receive electronic versions of reports or see just-in-time reports.

The most exciting stage will be when we start to put our curriculum online, breaking this down into units of work, lesson plans and allow electronic student submission of homework and collaboration. We are able to embed different pedagogies and work practices into the systems provided by Excido and start to capture, organise and view masses of information that will have been tamed through the learning and administration toolsets provided by Edumate2.

Rob Abbey is the Director of Learning and IT at SCECGS Redlands, one of the leading schools in NSW and may be contacted for further information at rabbey@redlands.nsw.edu.au
Edumate1 and Edumate2 are owned and supplied by Excido Pty. Ltd.