While our project is larger in scale than most school construction projects, the questions that guided our decision-making process are no different than questions you'd use for a one-building renovation project. At the end of the day, the technology you put in place in your classrooms needs to be congruent with your school's mission and with your classroom pedagogy. It needs to help make teaching and learning better. What follows are some key questions and methods we used to design and build our ideal school.
Know Who You Are
The Episcopal Academy was founded in 1785 in Philadelphia. On the surface, you may assume that the school's 225-year history would leave it rigid and steeped in unbreakable tradition. But, in the competitive independent school market in metropolitan Philadelphia, the reality is that a school must be adaptable and innovative in order to survive. The move to our new campus is, in fact, just the latest in a series of moves for the school over the course of its history, and the most recent case of the school needing to look to new ground to create a campus that could meet programming needs and accommodate future growth. The way that the school has been able to change, while being true to its core beliefs, is tied to a central sense of mission and identity.
The technology we put in place is no exception to this principle.
When beginning the process of planning technology in any building project, you need to start by knowing both how teachers and students already use technology, and how teachers teach and students learn to identify the new technologies that would make this process better. What The Episcopal Academy has built works wonderfully for us, but it may not be the secret ingredients to your own success. There is not a magic formula for designing an innovative and progressive technology program; rather, there are some best practices for how to plan for your own recipe. It is important to not just focus on what your school is doing now with technology, but to anticipate what you will be doing in the future. Think about how teachers and students adapted and grew to use what they use today: that will tell you something about how to prepare for your school's technology future.
The best way to get to know your technology needs is to involve the right people in the discussion. Use teachers to pilot and test new technologies you are considering; ask students what they wish they could do on your campus but can't due to current limitations; survey faculty to see which of the technologies that you have already put money into are working and which are not, and why. There is not a consultant who can answer these questions for you — and you should be wary of those who say that they can. At best, a good consultant can help you ask the right questions to get your own answers.
Which Technologies Should You Buy?
With limited budgets for technology in any building project, schools are faced with difficult decisions about which technologies to pick. It is very easy to be convinced that the classroom of the future looks a particular way. There are a lot of gadgets and very exciting technologies that look fantastic in classrooms and computer labs. If these tools do not connect to your classroom pedagogy, they will not make the difference you are seeking in teaching and learning. What you would ideally do is invest in those technologies that both give you the most bang for your buck in the classroom, and are things you can build upon from year to year with additional funds.
In our case, we made some decisions several years before we moved in order to pilot some key technologies to gauge how they fit with how we teach and learn. This gave us a chance to test them before we invested heavily. We looked at different types of interactive technologies, different A/V classroom displays, and different video distribution systems, and we had lengthy discussions about how teachers use different resources both inside and outside of class. We wanted to avoid piloting something after we moved in and the investment was already made.
In the world of interactive technologies, we chose tablet computers as our standard teaching platform and flat screen TVs instead of projectors, screens, and speakers as our multimedia hardware. Most teachers in third through 12th grades have their own tablet PC, which we introduced four years ago. Similar to standard laptops, but with an interactive screen, teachers use tablets in class as a whiteboard, or at home to grade student papers electronically. We compared this option to interactive whiteboards (such as Smart), and found that the whiteboards were used significantly less frequently by the teachers. In our case, it came down to comfort. Teachers brought their tablet home and used it for all of their day-to-day computing. Instead of having to learn two technologies — their computer and their interactive whiteboard — they only had to master one. They had confidence in using it and, therefore, used it more. There are certainly a lot of successful interactive whiteboard programs in schools. But it wasn't the right direction for us.
Our decision to go with flat screen TVs rather than standard LCD projectors was a bit more unconventional. We had been using projectors in our classrooms for several years. What bothered us was the ongoing cost of maintaining them, on top of a high installation fee. The TVs brought us a new option. The image quality was much stronger, but the tradeoff was a smaller display size. We installed one in a classroom prior to our move to get the feedback we needed. We found that the improved image quality made up for the drawbacks and the cost savings per room, both immediate with installation and ongoing, was tremendous. We are using these flat-screen displays around campus as information bulletin boards, enabling us to broadcast video announcements and to customize information for students in different buildings. We have also connected the TVs into our new video distribution system, a robust system of cable television stations as well as thousands of educational videos for teachers to use in class.
What is most important in buying classroom technology is knowing that your teachers will use it. They need to believe it is a technology that will both work and improve what they are doing. They also need to be comfortable using it and confident they can use it successfully in front of students.
When buying technology for student use, the questions get more complicated. Most schools have at least considered whether it makes sense for students to carry around their own laptops or tablets, with many deciding that this is the area in which to invest student computer dollars. These 1:1 initiatives are, in some cases, great successes and, in others, great failures. Typically, schools with unsuccessful programs failed to ask some key questions up front about how teachers would incorporate the laptops into class time, what technology staffing changes are needed to support the additional hardware, and what training both teachers and students need to make it work. We believe that, in some situations, 1:1 programs can be fantastic ways to leverage technology in the classroom. If the conditions are not right, they are not a good fit. The key in this decision is taking the time to evaluate carefully both the school's readiness for laptops and its ability to use them wisely across the curriculum. At The Episcopal Academy, we have not yet made that commitment, but we will be studying this issue carefully in the next year to decide if it is the right time for us to start a one-to-one program.
An area where schools can leverage funds more easily with student computer use is in specialty computer labs. In looking across program areas at a school, there may be disciplines that lend themselves well to a special technology-rich classroom. At Episcopal Academy, we have built in a few such labs that enable our students to further explore academic areas of interest on their own, and for teachers in those disciplines to use these new resources to develop new curricular directions. For instance, we have built in a music technology lab, a multimedia studio for both graphics and video editing, an interactive language learning lab, and a cutting-edge control booth for our theater tech program. While these spaces cost a bit more than standard labs, they are targeted areas that tie directly into curricular initiatives, and, thus, we know they will be used widely. Our recommendation for other schools, therefore, is to consider picking one or more areas where your school thrives, or is looking to grow, and to promote technology labs in these spaces. We have found that it is important to have the right faculty members eager to push the program along and to have them involved in the planning. With key teachers behind the effort, adding in a few high-profile spaces can make a big impact on curriculum.
Don't Forget the Basics
It is very easy, when planning new facilities, to focus on the bells and whistles — those technologies that draw attention and show that your school is cutting edge. But it is very important to remember to invest adequately in the "basics" of your technology program. Nobody will be singing the praises of the video lab if the network is too slow for students to use it and e-mail doesn't work. It is critical to assess what your priorities are and to be sure to build an infrastructure — cabling, servers, switches, bandwidth — that can support it. It is also important to allow for room to grow in your infrastructure. You want to avoid creating a situation where you have outgrown your capacity in two years.
In our case, we invested in the hidden technologies strongly. We have 10GB fiber connections between buildings (it's fast) with CAT 6e cabling inside buildings (also fast). We partnered with Cisco Systems to implement some key areas of our core network, including the switches that direct network traffic around campus, the wireless network, and the phone system. Depending on the scale of your project, you can speak openly with major vendors to see if they are interested in special pricing arrangements to outfit more than one part of the project. Often, prices for large projects are negotiable and you can get top-notch vendors like Cisco at a discount. In addition to Cisco, we partnered with Hewlett-Packard, who provided our servers, printers, and desktop computers, also at a discount.
We also paid attention to our bandwidth. This is our connection from campus to the outside world. Having a blazing fast internal network only gets you so far. If it still takes a long time to download a video to a classroom, the speed of the internal network is not worth the money. We opted to go with an option that not only gave us a lot of bandwidth to the Internet, but which also connected us to Internet2, an initiative that connects educational groups to a wide range of online learning content. Our bandwidth is what is called "burstable," meaning it can adjust as needed to change based on usage. Rather than having everything grind to a halt while someone downloads a large file, our connection expands and allows for greater bandwidth when needed.
You can evaluate what your current usage is with your Internet service provider and then use competing offers of service to look at the options that match both your budget and needs. Telecommunications plans and fees change so often that it is worth reviewing your account frequently. You may be able to upgrade to a much faster connection for the same money you are currently paying.
One of our guiding rules was to make sure the core technologies were solid before diving into extras. These core pieces — servers, network traffic flow, e-mail, and phones — are essential for students, faculty, and staff to work and learn in our school. We used the opportunity with the project to upgrade servers, to re-assess how our data is stored and backed up, to upgrade our e-mail system, and to invest in a phone system that would be reliable and easy to use (in our case, Cisco's VoIP system). Investing in these core pieces built confidence in the system and allowed teachers to take the time to try new technologies rather than fret over an unstable network.
Another "basic" is wireless network access. While seemingly costly on the front end, a good wireless network can take the load off of your wired network, minimizing how much cabling you need to run and how many network drops you need to place in each classroom. Beyond the cost factor, a good wireless network can transform your learning spaces. We wanted our wireless network to allow for the use of technology anywhere on campus, opening up how we think about the classroom as a space. We envisioned, for instance, our classes heading outdoors with laptops to learn, creating classrooms out of non-typical spaces. It was a priority for us to have wireless coverage all over campus, inside and outside buildings.
It was also important for the wireless connection to be stable and robust enough to support what our teachers want to do in the classroom, including showing videos and other bandwidth-heavy uses. We turned to Cisco for some guidance on what would get us there, and ended up investing in a somewhat emerging technology — the n standard. If you are familiar with the different letters assigned to wireless standards — a, b, g — n is the latest iteration, which promises significantly better range and connection speeds.
In deciding what type of wireless network to put in place, there are several things to consider. If you want to cover all or most of your campus, you may want to look to a managed system, which allows you to monitor all of your access points, tweak their ranges, and make sure all of your spaces are covered. We found it important to establish how and where students and faculty connect (and want to connect) to the network and the Internet and invest based on that priority.
Who Leads the Way?
Most schools do not have internal expertise to guide the process of designing and implementing a new data and A/V network. The consultants we brought into the process were specialists in key areas and were very competent. More importantly, however, they understood their role in hearing us as the client — our priorities, our vision, our expectations — and in taking their cue from us in making recommendations and in designing systems. Our internal team was integral in conversations about all aspects of the project, including design and budget. For this relationship to be achieved, the school needs to have an internal group empowered to work with the consultants in order to be certain the end result matched the school's vision of what the facility will enable teachers and students to do. Educational spaces are unique and it is important to hire experts who understand schools and have a solid record of working in education.
Having an internal team does more than having someone to act as a watchdog over consultants. It gives members of the school technology program an opportunity to gain skills and knowledge through the process that will help leverage the new technology the school is buying. Outsourcing the project and dumping new equipment on a technology department without their input does nothing to further their understanding or ownership of the tools. In the end, the technology department is the team leading the effort for students and teachers to use the tools, and it needs to be a vital part of the conversation from the beginning.
The Future of Our School
On many levels, what we have built can certainly be described as a "school of the future." It is built with growth and progress in mind. This campus, however, is also a school of the present and the past as well. We built a school that could meet us where we are in our technology use while giving us some new tools to push us forward. Where appropriate, though, we stuck with tried and true measures, including chalk boards in several classrooms and dedicated Harkness-method seminar rooms. There is also capacity to grow in areas we have not even envisioned yet. We can only assume we made some mistakes along the way. Time inevitably reveals that not all choices are the best — in which case you play the game of considering what you would do differently if you could. We are confident, however, that our processes of investigation, trial, and design have led us on the right path with the tools we need to move our program forward.
Your next building project may be different in size, scope, and budget, but the same process of deciding which technologies best fit your school's mission and pedagogy will undoubtedly help you invest your technology dollars wisely.
So what does your new school look like? Have fun discovering it.