Technology Roadmap
Where we are going!
What is our objective?
"Rapid and continuing advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) are changing the ways people share, use, develop and process information and technology. In this digital age, young people need to be highly skilled in the use of ICT. While schools already employ these technologies in learning, there is a need to increase their effectiveness significantly over the next decade."
Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians - December 2008
At the forefront of our thinking should also rest our strategic objectives of One School, Personalised Learning, and Quality Teaching and Learning. We need to be using technology to assist us in meeting these objectives.
What are we?
We provide devices on a 1:2 basis from Prep to Year 4. In 2014, we will be providing Chromebooks (Years 2-4) and Nexus Tablets in our ELC, Prep and Year 1 classrooms.
What we are not
What will 2014 bring?
We have switched to a managed service for Internet Security and Web Filtering and have a much clearer picture on what is happening within our Network. eg: if you are streaming a large video file from the Internet and taking up a chunk of our bandwidth in the process, we can see who is responsible for this and let you know!
A new phone system will be in place for 2014. This will greatly assist us with communication throughout the College. Calls can be received on the device of your choice - laptop, mobile phone, office phone etc using wired, wireless or broadband connections.
In 2014, we will become a Google Apps for Education school. Our email system will shift to Gmail and our staff and students will all have access to a Google Drive account set up in a Toorak College domain within Google Apps. Your email address will remain as is, and you will use this to sign into your Google Drive account. Google Apps provides up to 30GB of storage per user, powerful spam filtering, no ads and a service level agreement that promises 99.9% uptime.
Google Apps for Education will provide us with access to a collaborative document suite including Docs, Presentations, Spreadsheets, Forms and Drawings, offering real-time editing, powerful sharing controls and access to documents across devices. If a student's computer is in for repair, they can access their documents from another device by signing into their account eg: PC/Mac/tablet/netbook/phone.
The management console of Google Apps will enable us to manage Chomebooks, Nexus tablets and the Chrome Web browser. As teachers, you can determine Web apps you would like students to be using at specific year levels and we can push these out to devices from the console located in the IT Department. The single sign on feature of Google Apps will enable our students to use these apps without having to register for a new account.
Hapara Teacher Dashboard will overlay Google Apps, providing an instructional management layer giving you a snap-shot view of student activity across Docs, Sites, Blogger, Gmail, Google+ and Calendars.