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Make a note in your learning diary about your own professional development, for example:

a) The opportunities, challenges and problems you face that could be overcome with some training

b) List your top three training needs to help you do your job more effectively

c) Note the training possibilities in your area, whether online or face to face

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Always teachers and students expect more. In general people tend to become accustomed to call and receive the support, even if they could learn to fit it. In our school we offer support service to teachers, no to students directly. If they need help it has to be through the teachers.We are thinking about creating a FAQ with the most common problems and solutions, in order to have more time to do other things that can add more value to the school. In an ideal situation, teachers would be able to fix problems with projector's connexions, to search for solutions for basic problems in Google and youtube, to search for tutorials, so, to be able to resolve basic problems by themselves (1.1 and 5.1 digital competence in DigComp framework)

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As other people say the big challenge is the teachers’ training, not only in digital competences but also in methodologies… And being a public school, every year we have around 20 new teachers, and along the year substitutes. In the school strategic plan one of the main points is digital, so, hopefully, I have I have the manager’s support. When our students leave the school to start working in companies, they’d have to be digital competent, but to reach this goal teachers have to be also. So we have to push and push, adapting the training to different needs and offering different resources.

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Right now I think I have them, however it’s completely necessary to do courses and to go to events where other schools share their experiences, usually in those places you can learn a lot. I wouldn’t be able to manage the infrastructure, but sometimes it’s enough to have some background about it , just in order to be able to make proposals and discuss the needs.

The last long course I did, one week in Brussels, was about eSafety in European Schoolnet. Since we were implementing G-Suite and giving accounts to all our students that was the course I (we) need, and so, because we could use the learnings in a very short term the course was very good. So, I think that you have to identify in each moment which are your priorities and try to find some training that fits them.

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Ways to reduce ICT costs in your schoolHow do you make savings on your school’s ICT? Share your questions, tips and suggestions.

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Ways to reduce ICT costs in your schoolHow do you make savings on your school’s ICT? Share your questions, tips and suggestions.

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We are using for the last four years G-Suite, so we store files in the cloud and we reduced the work we had maintaining the shared resources in the server. We started two years ago replacing Windows computers with Chromebooks, the prices are competitive and you manage them from the admin panel in G-Suite, so less work. We have computers with Windows and MS Office and my idea, yet is not a school policy, is to migrate them to Linux and Open Office. Actually we don’t need Open Office been the school policy that for work we would have to use Google Docs, but is difficult to change some old habits, even with young people.

We are thinking about BYOD, however, being a VET school we need devices with keyboards, so, It’s not enough to have a smartphone. Right now we are doing a qualitative inventory of hardware and software in order to make decisions.

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The challenges of an ICT administrator (working with limited resources)

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The challenges of an ICT administrator (working with limited resources)

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Actually it’s very difficult to develop a digital strategy in schools this lack of human and material resources. Probably, it’s easier to have access to more material resources than human resources. Last year I was in a presentation about BYOD, it was a school in UK which had not fundings for equipment and after discussing it with families they finished using the students’ smartphones. In some places people are recovering old computers replacing Windows OS with some Linux distribution or Chromium.

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Both videos are interesting but for me there is a key point in Kolbrún’s presentation: she works for teachers, students and families, it seems that she doesn’t maintain the infrastructure and that she can focus on the pedagogical use of ICTs. She has a settled  dynamics meeting teachers with a syllabus to follow over the year.

She mentions that they use mobiles for searching information what I think is a good use for mobile devices although for creation are better laptops or desktops.

Another thing we are thinking about is to give one computer each teacher in the school. We use shared computers in departments and classrooms but I think it would be an improvement in the devices management to do the same way they do in those schools.

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Hopefully right now I don’t share my time with classes and I can focus all my efforts in ICT coordination. Since I work in a school with more than 1000 students and around 140 teachers, it was quite difficult to divide the time between classes and ICT coordination. I work mostly in ICT strategy and pedagogical use of the tools and there is another person to maintain the infrastructure. Having said that I think that there are two main different work fields: one infrastructure development and maintenance and the other related with the ICT strategy and the pedagogical use. For the first one there are different qualification levels in the field of computing science but for the second I think is more complicated. One of the problems we have is the lack of acknowledgment ICT coordinators have, at least in my country, and that is not very motivating. I like the learning context where you can be creative and when you learn things that you can use in a short term in the school.

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We have been using esafetylabel model since 2013. We were granted with the silver certificate at the end of 2014. The autoassesment tool is a powerful tool for schools, it helps identifying aspects you can improve in the school digital system management in order to be safer and to provide a consistent service to teachers and students.

It was a surprise to earn the silver label. We were told that to share our experience and documents we created with the community was a key point to earn it.

Every year we organise some event around Safer Internet Day: privacity, data protection, safe access to accounts are some of the subjects we have addressed in this events and we have to follow pushing on it.

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We have not encountered incidents, however, different teachers have different points of vue. We have not any policy about the use of mobile phones, only a short mention giving the teacher the option to give the permission to use them. I think we need to define the way they can be use in the school, furthermore, in a VET school since our students will use mobile phones in some professional fields we would have to train them to be competent in the use of them.

We share our AUPs (for students and teachers) in SlideShare in Spanish and Basque language. They are based in the esafetylabel model.

We have a newsletter about eSafety in the school, since most of our students are adults we use the same for teachers and students.

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First of all I think that is very important to have an agreement in the school about the information system policies and to have them in a formal document, not only in the ICT administrator’s mind. As well as a good firewall, updated operating systems and an updated antiviru, to train teachers and students it’s a basic strategy.

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We have a strong firewall and we use Kaspersky antivirus server managed. According to our policies about documentation management the documents have to be save in Google Drive, so we use the protection Google offers. However it is not easy to change some habits and some people continue saving documents in local or portable drives. We had an incident last year with one teacher who open a ransomware email and couldn’t again access to his documents, the documents he had created along one year. We are aware that the wink link is the person and that we have to push once and again. It’s not enough to offer training one year and think that it is enough for the next 5 years.

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It was the headmaster who took the last decision. It wasn’t easy at the beginning, usually the school leaders have not a good background about digital technologies and they need to trust the people who have some vision about it. Right now, after 7 years this is not a problem anymore and we have resources to go on with plans and developments.

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I think right now there is not another option but migrate to the cloud. The digital world is there, and if a VET school want to train the new professionals to do their job in the companies, it’s a basic strategy to adopt the trends that are spreading through the companies.

The main challenge we have is the students and teachers training and the second one the safety. As always the weak link are the persons. We are around 140 teachers and every year the 20% of them can be different. Most of our students are in the school for 53 weeks but some of them just for a few weeks. So we have to think about formulas to offer the training all of them need. The second challenge is the safety, students and teachers are not very aware of the risks in the digital world; we have policies for the use of digital services but you need to be pushing once and again.

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We are using G Suite for the last seven years. There were two main reasons to start working with G Suite: to use it as a tool in class and to move a big part of the management system to the cloud. Usually teachers work at home but we had not a system we could connect through the Internet, so we had to work with copies, pendrives and so on. Furthermore, we were able to appreciate that G Suite offer very useful tools for collaboration, something we wanted to start working with.

So we signed up for a G Suite account and we started working with teachers and some groups of students. Nowadays, every student and teacher has a G Suite account and we use mainly those services: Gmail, Groups, Drive, Docs, Classroom and Sites.

For us esafety it’s very important, so we are using the European Schoolnet eSafety label model to take care of it.

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Since we use laptops we need to have Wi-Fi, we can setup quite easy the access with the Chromebooks since we can have centralised the setup in the admin panel. We have an open SSID students can use in the breaks.

In some subjects students can use their own device, but it’s just an experience some teachers are carrying on. I think it’s an opportunity since they would have to learn how to use different devices for work and digital citizenships. All of us, students, teachers, families, managers… are learning how to manage digital devices in different work and social environments, we need new agreements about the use of this kind of devices in the school, and forbid them is not the solution.

Since we are thinking that students will bring to the school their own laptop, we need to offer solutions in order to charge the computer’s batteries, to give technical support and to have a safe place for the devices. First of all we need to define the school framework and policies for this project. I hope we will do it along this school year.

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We want to run it, however we need to think about it. We have not the use of smartphones in the classroom, it is the teacher who can allow or forbid the use of them. Some teachers use them when students have to search for information but we need to define some policies and strategies to take advantage of them. Most of our students are adults, so, to use the smartphone to follow good  sources of information is a good practice for their future.

This year we are also thinking about BYOD in another way, our students need computers in class and we have big problems with the IT system sustainability; so another option is to ask them to bring their own computer. We have to analyze the pros and the cons.

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We have had a lot of problems along the last years. mainly we had desktop computers and we started migrating to laptop computers without anticipate the new WiFi requirements we would have. We had not reflect on the infrastructure we would need for it, so we had to work in a reactive way, not the best way to work.

Nowadays, we are trying to create hardware and software policies for the school IT management, so, we hope in the future we will manage the IT system in a better way.

We have around 20 Xirrus XR 620 WiFi athens for 600 laptops and other devices, when we finish the deployment next month, we will see if it is enough, we hope it will be.

We have different SSIDs for students, staff, events and an open SSID just for breaks. Each teacher has its own username and password.

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Activity 2: Upgrading the school infrastructure

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Activity 2: Upgrading the school infrastructure

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Ways to improve the performance of your current infrastructure? We are finishing the update we started. We are replacing the old switches with new 1Gb switches and we hope some problems we have will be resolved after that. It will be the moment to measure the performance and assess its capacity.

Ways to make it more secure? One of the problems we are trying to resolve is the privacy in shared computers. We use Chromebooks wherever we can, and they are easy to manage and safe, however we can’t use them in some departments since they used specific professional software. We have some of them freezed with DeepFreeze which is a good solution to reduce maintenance needs and avoid privacy problems.

New types of devices or services you could put in place? Mainly services related to training. We need to create resources for self-learning for students and teachers.

How to provide technical support and ensure the network performs reliably? We want to create a FAQ for basic problems. There are some basic problems that are repeated over and over again. If we can offer a guide to teachers to solve them by themselves, we could reduce the amount of requests for maintenance and be able to do more valuable tasks.

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What is your school using ICT for?

For the last 6 years the ICT have been one of the main points in the school strategic plan. In the last one, 2016-2019 strategic plan, one of the goals is to think about how we work in order to develop the management policies we lack. We are using the DigCompOrg framework.

How are projects designed? I have contact with the School System Manager  almost everyday. I share with them the ideas I have and we decide together what to do.

Through individual initiatives? The individual initiatives are taken in account, the intra entrepreneurship is important but ICT project has to be a school project.

Through a more general school policy? We are doing our path. Being a public school we have some limits but we can develop our own vision.

How do you give access to technology to your students?

We have computers in the classrooms, mostly to be used in a 1-to-1 model. All the computers are connected to the Internet, most of them wireless. We are thinking about our model in this year, analyzing BYOD models, teachers’ computers...

We have been improving our network for the last two years, we have not finished the deployment and we have some WiFi dark zones in the school we have to improve. One of the questions I wrote down after watching the previous activity video, is to think about the capacity of our infrastructure when we finish the deployment.

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When I was watching this video I copy one of the questions she shares: What do we want to achieve using ICT in the school? I think this is the key question and the answer has to be given by the school community. Then, we can start solving the technical challenges, training teachers and implementing the plan we decide to achieve those shared goals. As she said the school vision is the basic component of the ICT strategy and plan.

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There is a company we contract in order to give us some services. They set up the infrastructure and we do the maintenance. We are using G Suite for Education, so we don’t offer any mail, file or data service in our servers. All the information about students in publics schools are in the Basque Government servers, so in this area we are just users, no managers.

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For the last two months we have two access to Internet, the broadest one is fibre 1Gbps and the other one fibre 200 Mbps. However this is not the standard in schools in my country. We have our own firewall protecting the system.

The main challenge is to give a good service through WiFi connections. We are updating our switch infrastructure from 100M to 1G and WiFi antennas. We had a big crisis for some time when some school departments started using laptops, we didn’t foresee the problem and we have been investing in hi-capacity antennas for the last two years.

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I work in a VET school in San Sebastian, in the Basque Country. It is a big school, we are around 140 teachers and 1500 students. We have more or less 700 computers for students and 200 for teachers and administration services. 700 of them are laptops. We have 15 switches and around WiFi hi-capacity antennas, so a complex infraestructure.

I am the ICT coordinator but there is another person to manage the infrastructure and we are working together. I have been for some years teaching subjects related to mechanics and working ass ICT coordinator in the schools, offering support to the staff of the school in order to digitalize different processes, promoting the use of digital tools in learning processes and offering training to teachers. It’s not easy to share two roles, in my case I’m lucky and this year I have all my time to work in ICT coordination.

We have started developing and registering managing policies and one of the goals we have is to document our network, we have not right now, so we have big problem when the infrastructure manager is ill.

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I am the ICT coorI am the ICT coordinator in my school, a VET school in Basque Country. We are 140 teachers and around 1500 students and we have around 1000 computers in our school. We have a person taking care of the infrastructure, so my work is about pedagogy and strategy.

We have started using DigCompOrg framework in our organization, so we need to think about how are we working and managing ICTs in order to establish protocols and policies.