Month: October 2022

Disaster Recovery Planning

Part of cyber resilience is considering what to do when the worst happens.    And that worst case scenario is sadly likely to inevitable at some point.    This worst-case scenario will take the form of a significant incident, a disaster from which the school or college needs to recover, and in planning for this a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan should have been created.   But what should such a plan look like?

I have given this quite a bit of thought.    Is this disaster recovery plan a long and detailed document or something much more simple and digestible?  

On one hand we might want the long document and all the details as in the event of a disaster we will want as much information as possible to help us with first isolating and managing the incident and then later with recovery.    The issue with this is that when the fire has been lit under the IT Services team due to an IT incident, the last thing anyone wants to do is wade through a long and complex document.   I have seen a disaster plan which included lots of Gantt charts with estimated timelines for different parts of the recovery, but how can we predict this with any accuracy against the multitude of different potential scenarios.   Additionally, the information you will actually need is likely to depend very much on the nature of the incident.

The flip side is the much more managable document which is easier to digest and look to in a crisis situation, when things are high stress but its shortness will lack some of the detail you may want.   That said, a shorter document will be easier to rehearse and prepare with when running simulated and desktop incidents such that staff remember the structure and are largely able to act without needing to refer too often to the supporting DR plan.   It is also more likely to be applicable across a wider range of scenarios.

The above however suggests only two options, being the detail or the brevity and ease of use, but my thinking on DR has led me to think we need to have both.    We need to have a brief incident plan which should be general and fit almost all possible incidents.    It should consider how an incident might be called and then which roles will need to be implemented including contact details for the various people which might fill each of the roles.   It should consider the initial steps only, getting the incident team together so they can then respond to the specific nature of the incident in hand.  It is the outline process for calling and the initial management of an incident.

Then we need to have the reference information to refer to which will aid in the identification, management and eventual recovery from an incident.   Now most of this should already exist in proper documentation of systems and setup and of processes, however this is often missed out.   When things are busy its often about setting things up, deploying technology or fixing issues, and documenting activities, configurations, etc, is often put off for another day, a day which often never happens.    I think the creation of this documentation may actually be key.

Conclusion

The specifics of a DR plan will vary with your context so I don’t think there is a single solution.   For me there are 3 keys factors.

  1. Having a basic plan which is well understood in relation to calling an “incident” and the initial phases of management of such an incident.   This needs to be clear and accessible so as to be useful in a potentially high stress situation.
  2. Having documentation for your systems and setup to aid recovery.  This is often forgotten during setup or when changes are made, however in responding to an incident detailed documentation can be key.
  3. Testing your processes to build familiarisation and to ensure processes work as intended, plus to adjust as needed.

DR planning is critical as we need to increasingly consider an incident as inevitable, so the better prepared we are the greater potential we have for minimising the impact of the incident on our school or college.

Feeling down

Have been trying to post a blog once a week but missed out last week having found things a bit of a struggle.    The end of term was manic, as I suspect it was in many schools across the UK and across the world.    I was extremely busy finding myself trying to balance a multitude of different tasks and projects.   Additionally, I was working on my personal fitness trying to complete 100km of running during October, having failed to do so during September due to a cold which had stopped me running for most of the final week. 

And so the half term arrived and my energy levels suddenly plummeted.  Exhaustion, or at least that’s what I now believe it was, kicked in.    I managed to drag myself out for a 10km run last Saturday albeit it was very broken and particularly slow however after this my energy was spent.   I suddenly found myself with little energy and little motivation to undertake a variety of personal tasks and projects, as well as work related tasks.  In fact, I found myself with little energy to undertake much at all. 

Sunday arrived and I found myself depressed.   Part of this was due to my low energy levels, and my inability to getting moving forward on things while another part was related to the fact that Saturday, and an opportunity to undertake personal tasks and achieve something, had came and went with little to nothing achieved.  The fact I couldn’t focus sufficiently to get a blog put together only added to way I was feeling and to my worsening outlook.

Monday was little better.   I had plans for a run.   My plan revolves around 4 runs per week of 6km each if I am to achieve my 100km, with my runs normally Monday, Wednesday and then Friday and Saturday.   The Monday run never happened as I couldn’t motivate myself to get up and out in the morning, with the same issue on the Tuesday.   And this lack of progress, despite my plan, further put a dampener on my mood.   

It wasnt until mid week before I was able to work to correct my mood and pull myself out of the depressive cycle which was building.   I knuckled down despite how I felt and a number of successive work tasks completed including a couple which provided a bit of satisfaction all helped to improve how I felt and my outlook.

Its Friday now and I sit on a train on the way home from a trip to London.   I feel significantly better than I did at the start of this week, but the events of the last week highlight how variable my mood and feelings can be.   When I look back a year or more my sense is that my mood is reasonably level however this is the illusion of memory;   the reality is my mood is very variable.   The challenge for me is to find ways to manage this.   This time it was putting my head down and working but I doubt that will always work.   The question then is how can I prepare and identify coping strategies for should my motivation and outlook “tank” at some point in the future.   I also think on reflection I have grown to be good at managing lots of task and managing being busy, but not so good or happy when it comes to down time, to sitting relaxing watching TV or reading a book.   Although I know these are important acts in allowing me to decompress, relax and recover, it doesn’t feel productive and therefore leads to feelings of depression.   Thinking about it, I can see why this might happy given a normal workday might see 10 or 12 items ticked of a to do list, whereas sitting through 10 episodes of binge-watch TV does quite compare in terms of a feeling of achievement.

Am not sure if this post will resonate with others but thought I would share anyway as maybe it will help others, or maybe it will just help me at some point in the future, as a reminder that things are more chaotic and variable than we remember, but that in the end most things work out. I suspect we could all do better in being aware of our mood and feelings, and seeking to better manage them.

VR and lesson self-review

Have been experimenting with ideas for the use of VR kit in schools for a while now.  So far, my focus has been on some uses in Art, uses in Design Technology plus also in History and Geography.   The other day however I thought of another possible application focussed on pedagogy and self-review.

In terms of pedagogy, one of the most powerful tools in terms of supporting improvement has always been that of peer or self-review.  Now I am not talking high pressure lesson observation here, I am talking constructive low threat observations where colleagues sit in and watch each other teach then discuss.   I remember spending time as an IT teacher watching a colleague teach History, and I remember taking much away from his approach, which was very different to mine at the time.

The challenge here however has always been that of inviting someone in to watch your lesson.   For some this can feel somewhat daunting.   It is also important to acknowledge that we are all individuals so just because someone else prefers an approach to teaching, behaviour management, etc, doesn’t necessarily mean it is right for you.  

While working with teachers some years ago this brought me to the use of video footage where a camera was placed in the room, under agreement with the teacher and then they could watch the footage back and conduct a self-review.     This largely got over the issue of reluctance or nervousness in relation to having someone else in the classroom observing.   It wasn’t however a perfect solution as video footage is the limited view it presents.   It can be focussed on the front of the room, if there is one, but that misses out the edges of the class or it could be a wide angle, but then loses the detail.    Two camera setups would help address this however result in additional cost plus setup requirements as well as the potential need to edit the footage together for review.

So where does VR come in?

My thought therefore is the use of a 360-degree camera to take the video with the camera sat in the centre of the room as much as is possible.    The footage can then be either viewed on a PC, using VLC for example which allows you to pan around, or better still uploaded to a VR headset such as the Oculus Quest 2, where the teacher can then sit virtually in their own lesson and look around as the lesson progresses.  Basicallly this allows the teacher to put themselves back in the lesson but from the viewpoint of a student, dependent on the location of the camera, but able to look around the room as needed.    Looking at Hattie’s Visible Learning research (see more here) “video review of lessons” has a high effect size of 0.88 and that would have been based on standard video camera based footage so my hope would be that 360-degree based footage would be equally effective if not more.

Limitations/Challenges

So cost is an issue here as you need the camera however the VR headset is an optional although nice to have.   The next issue is the fact that having a camera in the room may encourage students to play up to the camera, however I think this can be managed and if usage became common students would grow accustomed and therefore eventually ignore the cameras presence.

And when using the little Theta 360 camera I am currently looking to use the recording is limited to 25mins per recording which represents only a fragment rather than the full length of a lesson.

Conclusion

Now at this point this is only an idea which I am looking to experiment with.  My thinking is that anything that supports self-review of teaching and learning will have potential for significant impact.  Whether the VR element adds enough additional impact over the lower cost video solutions, I am unsure of, however I am equally unsure of the potential benefits of a more immersive lesson review experience.   

So, for now its onwards with the experimentation.

Some future tech thoughts

Recently have been trying to put some time aside to think about long term strategy rather than the more mundane day to day.   I have been trying to look out into the future and maybe the next 10 to 15 years of technology in schools.   In doing so I have identified 4 themes or areas which I believe we should be focussing on.

Sustainable, safe and secure

This is likely the easiest theme to identify.  If we assume that tech use is only going to grow as we progress into the future then we need to ensure that “it just works”.   This is key and is part of the sustainability challenge.   If technology has issues or problems, users, both students and teachers alike, will quickly turn away from it.   As a result we need to make sure the technologies used including the infrastructure such as Wi-Fi, internet bandwidth and our IT networks, are future proof and include plans for replacement and renewal as we move forward into the future.   Purchases of infrastructure such as wireless access points, network switches and also the client end points all need to be viewed as continual investments, with planned replacement built in rather than one-off costs.  Our plans need to ensure our technology and infrastructure is sustainable into the future

Also, in relation to sustainability we need to start considering environmental impact.   We need to consider who we source our equipment from, how it is produced, how it is delivered and where it goes once it is end of life.   We also need to consider the environmental impact of its use including energy usage for example.   As we move forward into the future, I can see the importance of environmental sustainability continuing to grow and become a greater factor in decision making.

And as we work in schools, the safety and security of the technologies we use, the data we process and the end users, both staff and students, continues to be a critical issue.    We will need to do a better job of assessing the security of products and solutions we use to ensure we keep our data and our users safe and secure.

Digital citizens

Related to the above, how we seek to keep our students safe in this digital world, online and on social media will be a key focus balanced out against the challenges presented by the need for individual privacy and freedom of speech.    There will also be challenges in relation to increasing use of automation and AI including the ethics of categorising and targeting individuals and groups through data and the implications of black box AI solutions making decisions about aspects of our lives, where although we may be able to create a narrative for the decision in hindsight we may never actually know exactly how the AI arrived at it.  And these are just of couple of the many challenges.

All of this highlights the need to develop digital citizens in our staff and students, plus also our wider communities including parents.   Lots of the benefits and risks created through technology and technology use are new, and have never existed in history, therefore we will need to work through them together.    We will need to create the culture and climate to support the open discussion and dialogue in relation to technology and its implications, and we will need to continually update and review our awareness and our understanding.   This will be critically important but sadly, far from easy and far from quick.

Emerging technologies

The pace of technology continues to be quick with new solutions appearing regularly.   It is therefore important to keep one eye on the future.    Looking forward now I see a number of areas which school should be thinking about including the potential for Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality use within schools.  Some schools are already dipping into this but I see bigger untapped potential which is yet to be realised.    Haptics and wearable technologies are another area where there may be potential within schools.   Some potential applications are clear, such as the use of fitness solutions like Fitbit, etc, in relation to physical education or even biology in schools; other future solutions or applications are as yet not as clear.    Artificial intelligence is another emerging area, although I note many EdTech vendors already shouting from the hills about how they use AI, something I am largely sceptical about;  I suspect many are mistaking a complex series of If..Then..Else for AI.   That said, as we move forward I suspect more applications for AI will become apparent, particularly applications for narrow focus AI solutions designed for a specific purpose rather than the more aspirational general purpose AI of Hal from Space 2001 or Data from Star Trek.  And online examinations using adaptive testing solutions replacing our paper based examinations is another emerging area I see in our future.   How will we ensure school infrastructure supports these tests and how can we prepare students for this new age of assessment?

The power of data

Schools already gather huge amounts of data and this is only growing.   I am not just talking about the data teachers may enter in school management solutions as part of parental reporting processes.   We now have data generated in terms of student interactions with online platforms, such as Google Classroom or MS Teams, we have online quizzes where we might be able to see not only student scores, but the time taken, the device used, the time per question, if answers were changed, etc.   Every time we interact with technology more data is being created.    The question looking forward therefore is how can we use this data?   How can we create value from this data and inform teaching and learning?    This for me is a key opportunity as we look forward to the future.  Again though, not an easy one, as the data is often siloed in different solutions or is unstructured or poorly structured.   There is a lot of work to be done here but for me the potential is clear.

Conclusion

The above four areas are what I see as the key areas of focus for the future.   There are many other areas which could be considered however these four, in my opinion, represent the greatest importance and/or potential in relation to schools and colleges.  

Some of the above will see progress in the short term, however I suspect some wont see much progress for a number of years.   The importance here though is in setting a direction of travel.