Interview with: KM (Computer Coordinator)

Applecross Senior High School

Ardross, Perth, Western Australia

17th September 2002

 

  1. AF: Do you have a school policy [on ICT]?

  2. KM: Yes we do have a policy. We actually wrote up a school plan a number of years ago, and we update it each year. There is in fact a state policy which is implemented. Some guidelines came out and they had a funding push with about $80 million spread across all the schools, and the Learning Technologies Project. As you can see here there is a strategy we have to follow to satisfy the funding requirements.

  3. AF: Can I get a copy of that?

  4. KM: I’m sure this 1998 document is available.

  5. AF: In terms of priorities, is the school plan pre-eminent here or has it now been superseded by the state plan?

  6. KM: Well, we were already actually into a Technology Plan as it was. I was the head of computing here since about 1989; I was originally a Science Teacher, but did a Grad Dip and swapped over. Only, I thinking in 2000, we…. We used to have a committee, a computing committee, basically it was people who were interested. They were interested in getting computers into the school. We had actually made a good push, we had already set up our planning for a fibre backbone, and all that. And suddenly the school came through with an upgrade (funding package). And we said Whoopee! So we grabbed it, and that’s where we got our networking from. It was fantastic. So when the money came through from the Department, we already had that established. So we were able to use the money to buy machines. Or to lease machines, rather than having to having to use it for the backbone as some schools had to do. We already had that. The funding came just at the right time. We then formalised the committee, which then became called the IT committee. That actually has a member from each learning area. The learning area elects their own member.  We vote. We have two IT coordinators, Fran and myself. Each of us teaches 0.8 and we have 0.2 off. We had to fight like crazy to get that, because before you were expected to do everything. At that time, John McKinley who was also here. He started in Science, came to computing, and then retired. We said, no, you can’t do that, come back. So he came back, and he is our Network Administrator come Technician. We pay him 0.6 of a full time teacher’s salary. [He confirms he works a shorter day than a full time teacher]. The funding for this came out of the Department IT package. Other schools have to share their support, or they get a bloke out one day a week and that is hopeless. John’s background has developed with our system.
    I can remember when we had one computer, and I can show you the patchboard we used to patch it through to every class in the school. So we have gone from that to 278 machines with a whole server farm, an intranet, and Internet connection, and the whole lot. It has been exciting to watch it develop.

 

  1. AF: I have noticed that in most cases schools are comparatively computer deserts compared to student’s homes.

 

  1. KM: Yes, they are. I mean I think we did a survey last year or so, and about 90% of students have machines, and about 60-70% are better than the machines we have here. We had a  lot of problems with kids coming to school with assignments and they were all using Word 2000. Our standard at that time was Word 97. So we had to upgrade and now our standard software is Office 2000.

 

  1. AF: Are you coping the same problem because of XP?

 

  1. KM: Yes. The thing is not very friendly to networking. We have had a few problems. The staff have actually been offered at the beginning of this year laptops at a very reasonable price. I think it comes to $14-$18 per week. A very reasonable lease, over 3 years. The staff think they should have been provided [for free anyway]. There is an argument for that. But I think that whatever is going, you grab.

 

  1. AF: [Victorian laptop scheme with teacher’s promised ownership through residual purchase at lease-end]

 

  1. KM: $14.60 per fortnight is the payment here. There’s been no talk about buy-back at the end, but I imagine there would be.

 

  1. AF: That could be a benefit for staff.

 

  1. KM: Yes. I think the staff are only going to be paying about $200-$300 at the end. The Department probably got the machines very cheaply. I reckon if the staff pick up the residual, they are going to come out cost-neutral.

 

  1. AF: Do staff know laptops are 100% deductible and exempt from fringe-benefits tax?

 

  1. KM: I have usually claimed home computers all in one hit, because I can’t be bothered to depreciate it. I’ve told staff that’s what I do, with 80% business and 20% personal use.

 

  1. AF: Can I get hold of a copy of the school plan?

 

  1. KM: The school technology plan? I have a copy of the original buried somewhere which is the size of a book, but these are copies of the extracts. The original took me ages to write, but it was in fact it was the work of the whole committee bringing different ideas together. This is a summary of what we have done. You can see there the strategy we have employed.

 

  1. AF: You have strategies which address staff competencies, and disposition of equipment.

 

  1. KM: Here’s the overview of implementation strategy, right at the beginning. Those are the overarching statements, because what we have got is a curriculum improvement program going on at the same time at state level. I have a pamphlet somewhere here. That is actually an overview of the curriculum framework, and you will see here they have an number of overarching statements. Those ones are the ones that relate to computers, numbers 3 and 4. You will probably find some others, but those are the main ones.

    Basically we wanted as many bums on seats in front of computers as possible, which is why we went for the lease policy. And the next step [we decided] if you wanted to get staff and students working on machines you would have to get the staff competent first. So our main thrust has been to get the staff up to speed. At the beginning of this year, 50% of staff took up the laptops, which is pretty good.

 

  1. AF: Is the laptop program as effective in PD terms as the hands on tutorial approach?

 

  1. KM: We have about 10 who did not take on the laptops because only ACER (PC compatibles) were made available, and they wanted Macintoshes. There is a big drama going on now, because somewhere along the line they were promised Apples iBooks. So there are a few whinges and grievances going on as well against the Department.

 

  1. AF: So you are basically a dual-platform school?

 

  1. KM: Yes. Not necessarily by choice. Because of the 270 odd machines I think I only have about 30-40 Apples. And that is mainly because we concentrated on educational requirements and the Art department, bless their hearts, were into tutors and the art industry had Apples, they wanted them as well. I said that’s fair enough. So we put a lab down there with 20 iMacs. We put about 4 up in remedial because they easy and simple to use. And I think one of the guys in Science is a real Apple freak and as a result he put 7 machines in his lab. So he has a mixture of Apples and PCs. The problem with the iMacs is that they do not gell at all well with our NT network. So whereas all our students have a home directory they can access from any machine with their own logon, the iMacs can’t do it. And they can’t communicate wither. E-Macs apparently can, provided you have a Win2000 server. And that’s were we want to be. And that is my main drag against it, because you have to have to maintain a separate database. They use our network of course to access the Internet. But it means it has to be two logins.

 

  1. AF: And that is difficult?

 

  1. KM: Yes, right. The computer character over there [in Art] maintains the computers for my. I’m fine with that, I say go ahead. So he generally looks after that. And to be fair we had a lot of problems at the beginning, but it wasn’t really his fault, it was the way it was set up. It was put in wrong. It took a long to get set up right.

 

  1. AF: We got round that by using a Unix server, but authentication is a problem which is now being solved at a University level using an LDAP protocol. Many Mac-based programs are also available in key-stroke compatible form on the PC. Particularly in Music.

    Let’s look at the next question. How many students are there on the role.

 

 

  1. KM: Here are yesterday’s figures – 1342. It has been about that over about the last 10 years.

 

  1. AF: you are going from Year 8 – 12.

 

  1. KM: That’s right.

 

  1. AF: You have given me the number of workstations so I can work out the ratios.

 

  1. KM: Yes, on top of that there are about another 55-58 admin machines for staff. But they are not accessible to students.

 

  1. AF: Do you go so far as to have a separate network?

 

  1. KM: We actually have a V-LAN. That is because the Department says you cannot have education and the curriculum on the same machines.

 

  1. AF: So does that mean staff can log onto a student machine and access their resources?

 

  1. KM: It’s hard. You actually tell the port this is a  staff-only machine, so they can’t do that. It uses intelligent routers.

    You can log onto a staff machine and it has  trust relationships so it can access a student machine. But that port [the staff machine is plugged into] is a staff port. All the machines in the labs are student machines. For security reasons obviously they are all designated as student ports. But what we are doing now is experimenting with wireless networking to support the staff laptops. When the laptops came in the idea was that they were portable, you could use them wherever you liked. So you don’t  want to be running around with a piece of blue wire.

    So we have started that. We have a station up top, and we have a plan for about 4 or 5 stations around the school. That will work well, and prices have come down. There is a run down in these papers. It’s the old standard of 11Mbps, but it can handle the number of staff machines. If we go to students on wireless, we are going to have to go to a much higher speed.

    But I think that is a fair way down the track, so we don’t worry about that.

 

  1. AF: I always quote Moore’s Law to my students.

 

  1. KM: But the money doesn’t always follow. So we are starting off getting the staff to use the machines in the classrooms, and the sooner you make that transition the better. The wireless network is only on the staff network. So they can’t use the laptops as a teaching resource for students.

 

  1. AF: It is difficult to get staff to have a conceptual understanding of these issues. For really good educational reasons they sometimes try to move machines around.

 

  1. KM: We have faced that problem.  Staff use e-codes and students have usernames. The laptops have increased their level of understanding. Once we get hold of a machine we map drives on the student machines, so they can access any student folder they want to. And we have a shared drive as well, which is a forerunner of an information management system. The shared drive has really been the biggest boon. We originally had a read-only drive and staff put stuff everywhere. I re-organised it last year into learning areas,  and then the year groups. That is the way we have set it up and it has been very useful. It has got the staff using the facility. All the machines are connected and it is on the Internet with 64kbps going out and a satellite connection coming in. The downloads are not limited. It costs us about $1000 per month on volumetric account. We get a monthly report on every student, and lists the web-sites they have been to and the amount of time spent on each. [The largest data quantity downloaded was about 59Mbytes in the month of August, with .mov, .mp3 and .avi files from educational sites being the main contributors to the total].

 

  1. AF: Very interesting. Is there a limit on each students?

 

  1. KM: We have a limit of 150 Mbytes, which is pretty generous. We talked to the top ten about their consumption. Some things were not using proxies. The streaming videos chew up the stuff.

 

  1. AF: The school I am on the committee for is charged about 9c per excess megabyte.

 

  1. KM: We are being charged 17c per excess over 1.3Gbytes per month.

 

  1. AF: That’s a lot! And you used 11Gbytes over your free amount.

 

  1. KM: We might bring it down a bit actually.

 

  1. AF: You are three times more generous than the school I work with. But we are all feeling our way in this area.

 

  1. KM: Yes. But I think 150Mbytes is far too generous.

 

  1. AF: You told me you reckoned 90% of students had a computer outside school. Are there any policies that cover that relationship between home and school computing?

 

  1. KM: Students are allowed to bring in assignments on floppy, and we allow them to use e-mail. We don’t actually provide student e-mail accounts, but we let them set up their own on Hotmail etc. We looked at it and decided we had enough on our plate. We have only had one incident where a girl complained about being sent nasty e-mail. But this guy sent it as a joke, but it wasn’t a joke and he was dealt with pretty severely. The kids are aware about this. We have an Internet Users Policy which is posted on our Intranet.

    What we are endeavouring to do, and this is down the track, is giving the kids access to our library resources and their folders from home. It will happen [in the future] using Virtual Private Networking, so long as it is safely. We will implement our new library server, and that is what we will use to implement it. Our intranet page has our daily notices as a PDF file, and we put our newsletter on it as well.

    I have to upgrade my skills with DreamWeaver. It is so difficult to explain to an external contractor exactly what you want.

 

  1. AF: We use Dreamweaver internally, but we train the students to use FrontPage.

 

  1. KM: We have a Microsoft licence agreement, but I got a Macromedia Pack which proved very cost effective. I got funding from the TAFE committee for that.

    The library has a system called AIMS which allows searches by author, title etc. The advantage of this is the search facility. We are also developing MasterFile, which is like a digital library. Attached to it is an assets management module. All you have to do is put the stuff up, and worry about how it is going to be accessed. This will replace the S [shared] drive, because that is not  searchable. They have just come up with a new version [of Masterfile] but we will have to have a new server, the old one is not up to it. The new one is a lot more friendly than this. This is a product by     Concord. I had the guy out last week who wrote it who came out to talk to us about the new system. There used to be a link between the AIMS system and Masterfile, and now they are developing separate products. It is basically like an information portal, so when kids log on it will realise what grade they are in and so it will only bring up information related to that yeargroup, And the same will apply to staff, so it will know what his timetable is, and the subjects he is teaching, he will only see the things he needs to see.

 

  1. AF: There has been an evolution of information management systems, from the S drive to the Intranet, AIMS and now Masterfile.

 

  1. KM: Yes. It is important. I have been trying to get things like the staff handbook, but the office is still geared to putting things on paper. So you get things like this [the staff handbook in electronic version consists of multiple files, one for each page].

 

  1. AF: Have you considered using Master documents in Word to combine them together?

 

  1. KM: Interesting. That is excellent. As you can see in this format it is absolutely useless.

    There are search engines on our Intranet as well, with links to CD-ROM encyclopaedias etc.

 

  1. AF: Can we go back to home-school computing. Do students ever get homework set where they are expected to use a computer?

 

  1. KM: I guess they actually do. I teach Information Systems and Digital Media. I do expect them to do some development at home I don’t specifically say, but the inference is there that you should be able to do this at home. But you obviously can’t say that because you can’t expect the students to have a machine at home.

 

  1. AF: You can have that debate with teachers, when they have to see they are disadvantaging the majority if you don’t exploit machines at home. Do you have to wait until you have 99% home ownership before you acknowledge them?

 

  1. KM: [laughs] Yes! You can go into a class and ask what the current percentage is now. It’s a tricky one.

    I teach all upper school subjects. And I am very surprised when I get a handwritten assignment. I actually have only one student who gives me handwritten work – everything else is word processed.  Even though it is not stated, virtually everything is done on computer.

 

  1. AF: We have talked about sharing homework data between school and home. Is software shared between them?

 

  1. KM: I often have students ask me for software, and I have to say to them NO. Particularly when it is licensed commercial software. We do use a lot of shareware and freeware, and it is very useful. There has also been talk of software rental, which would be good because we could just use it for the 10 weeks we need it.
    But there is no definite policy on it.