BYOD: A window of opportunity for Lowanna College

This guest post is written by Matt Robinson, the Information & Communication Technology Manager at Lowanna College. He shares his story of how technology helps him and the 1000+ students at Lowanna College to reach their full potential.

In our community we recognise that 24/7 access to technology, both at home and at school, is essential to preparing our students for the ever evolving technological world. As a school with more than 1000 students, we are constantly looking for ways to inspire and engage our current generation of learners to help them reach their full potential both now, and into the future.

Lowanna College is a school situated in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, which currently experiences some of the highest rates of unemployment in Australia. We recently embarked on a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) program, which gives parents the opportunity to choose a device that fits within their respective budgets, whilst most importantly meeting the learning needs of their individual child.

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Despite having one of the largest business-grade, single site ICT networks in the Gippsland region, we faced the challenge of managing over 900 different devices such as Windows laptops, iPads and Samsung tablets, each with differing operating systems. This caused the school’s IT team serious headaches, and also ran the risk of hindering our student’s ability to collaborate and share information – which is why we made the move to Windows 10. We wanted to make sure we had a single unifying operating system that could easily support each and every one of our student devices.

“We faced the challenge of managing over 900 different devices such as Windows laptops, iPads and Samsung tablets, each with differing operating systems. This caused the school’s IT team serious headaches, and also ran the risk of hindering our student’s ability to collaborate and share information – which is why we made the move to Windows 10.”

When I first looked at Windows 10, I was pleasantly surprised with how pleasing to the eye and functional it was. The key drivers for the college moving to the platform was the fact that it was easy-to-use and navigate with the return of the start button. Most importantly though, it is able to run on devices that are up to six years old without a problem.

Factoring in the circumstances of our local community, the fact that Windows 10 is compatible with older devices which means that students and their families don’t have to pay a lot of money to upgrade and are still able to retain their old devices while getting all the advantages with the free Windows 10 Education download. In fact, older devices running Windows 7 are running even faster once we installed Windows 10.

As part of our BYOD strategy for 2016, we wanted to be as hands-off as possible and allow our students and their families to manage devices themselves. Whilst we update devices with our Lowanna College Image as well as the eduSTAR Software Portal, Windows 10 gives families’ maximum autonomy over the way they choose to use their device. All that we have to do is tell families to buy or bring a Windows device – nothing could be easier but still allow a wide range of flexibility for our community.

Whether it’s installing personal apps from the Windows Store or accessing school based software portals, the capabilities of the technology they purchased can be fully realised both at home and at school. The student’s feedback around this has been extremely positive, as it’s something they can do easily during a lesson.

“Factoring in the circumstances of our local community, the fact that Windows 10 is compatible with older devices means that students and their families don’t have to pay a lot of money to upgrade and are still able to retain their old devices while getting all the advantages with the free Windows 10 Education download.”

Prior to this migration, we had experimented with Google Apps for Education, and what we found was that there was no familiarity for our staff – especially when doing their curriculum planning. This was disruptive as we really needed tools that maintained a level of consistency.

When Lowanna College finally made the move to Windows 10 Education edition, we were excited to find out that with Microsoft’s academic volume licensing, the platform worked effortlessly with a range of software products and tools like OneNote, OneDrive for Business and Office 365 Pro Plus.

Having Windows 10 and the Office suite has made our lives a lot easier here in the IT office. If students come with any issues, we can solve it straight away and a lot faster on Windows 10, because everything on the platform runs faster.

What’s more, the connection between Office 365 and OneDrive ensures that our students work is constantly being backed-up to the cloud. This makes everything a lot easier when it comes to recovering lost homework or assignments.

“What’s more, the connection between Office 365 and OneDrive ensures that our students work is constantly being backed-up to the cloud. This makes everything a lot easier when it comes to recovering lost homework or assignments.”

In a classroom setting, given a number of our teachers are not super tech savvy and often have ten things going on at any one time, the Windows 10 and Office 365 environment has also proved to be a great combination. It makes our students devices more powerful and facilitate better learning, whilst enhancing the teaching potential of our staff through things like multi-tasking and real-time collaboration. It also has a great selection of apps that provide rich resources for researching, teaching and learning. But above all else, we’ve found that Windows 10 is intuitive to the way students learn and has been reliable on any device – laptop, 2-in-1 or tablet.

“The migration to Windows 10 has truly been a win-win, as it has underpinned our BYOD strategy, helped our community gain a better return on investment, and also helped achieve our vision of providing students with 24/7 access to technology both at school and at home”

We always think about education as something that empowers us with skills and knowledge to tackle challenges in the future, so it was important for us to align the technology our students use with what is being used in the businesses and industries of today. It’s no surprise that Windows and Microsoft Office are the mainstream software and applications used, so by deploying these at Lowanna we put our students in a better position to tackle the modern online workforce.

The migration to Windows 10 has truly been a win-win, as it has underpinned our BYOD strategy, helped our community gain a better return on investment, and also helped achieve our vision of providing students with 24/7 access to technology both at school and at home. Looking ahead, the opportunities are endless – we’ve only just touched the surface.

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