Andrea Mrak's Learning Diary for course "Administering School ICT infrastructure" by ANDREA MRAK https://padlet.com/andrea_mrak/65p0gbbmuzli I am a School ICT Lab assistant since 2003, and I previously had a 13 years technical background experience as Junior Systems Administrator. en-us 2016-11-22 09:29:49 UTC 2017-01-04 08:38:00 UTC hello@padlet.com My situation (why I'm here with all of you) andrea_mrak https://padlet.com/andrea_mrak/65p0gbbmuzli/wish/139290840 Instead of simply keeping the ten labs technically functional and help teachers in using them, I forcibly have to project, deploy, mantain and develop the whole ICT infrastructure of a group of eight primary schools and two fist grade secondary schools, and this is mainly because nobody else around me would do it.
I know for sure that many other course participants share this same situation with me, and we all know that it means carrying a very heavy load.
Moreover, being we often far from cutting edge technologies we rapidly  find ourselves unaware of the new possibilities going around, and we get very little professional updating courses to attend, if any.]]> 2016-11-22 09:44:15 UTC https://padlet.com/andrea_mrak/65p0gbbmuzli/wish/139290840 1.5 Activity 1 - purposes of ICT andrea_mrak https://padlet.com/andrea_mrak/65p0gbbmuzli/wish/145204246
03/01/17 09:15 

Since I'm talking about 8 primary schools and 2 intermediate schools, I must point out that we have 10 different situations to analyze. Nevertheless there are some aspects that all our schools have in common.

First of all a strong encouragement to expand the use of ICT in education is clearly felt, coming from directional offices, so the use of ICT by teachers brings them much respect (also among the students), and a lot hardware appliances are being bought and placed "in production" every year. Second aspect is a form of "resistance" against ICT that is spread among the teachers and persists through the years, contrasted only by time and turnover. This contrast is mainly generational and is rapidly increasing, at the point that no clear vision of ICT is widely shared, and every educational initiative with ICT is strictly individual, leaving very little clues to others, if any. Nonetheless, younger teachers use school's ICT resources or their own laptops daily, and every single student makes many ICT lab experiences during their 8 years permanence. Every subject is treated, in the lab experiences, but Maths in intermediate schools, primarily because of the difficulty that teachers have in studying and in teaching the use of software for writing complex math expressions.
]]> 2017-01-04 07:56:19 UTC https://padlet.com/andrea_mrak/65p0gbbmuzli/wish/145204246 1.7 Activity 2: Upgrading the school infrastructure andrea_mrak https://padlet.com/andrea_mrak/65p0gbbmuzli/wish/145204417
Ways to improve the performance of your current infrastructure:
We really should implement a VPN connection between all our schools, I only need time to learn how to do it...

How you could expand the school network:
Many teachers feel the need for a cloud storage and communication service in order to create virtual classrooms
that students can reach from their homes.
Also, still not all our primary schools have complete internal WiFi coverage.

Ways to make it more secure:
allowing only registered devices to use the WiFi networks, identified by hardware address.

New types of devices or services you could put in place:
We need an asset management network inventory service to keep our hardware and software inventory updated coherently.

How to provide technical support and ensure the network performs reliably:
Redundance of network appliances should be a must, but scarcity of funds makes such kind of expenses unacceptable. Automatic monitoring of all the schools' networks could instead be achievable.
]]> 2017-01-04 07:58:49 UTC https://padlet.com/andrea_mrak/65p0gbbmuzli/wish/145204417