Last week was half term and from an IT Services point of view this represents an opportunity to catch up on things and to do maintenance and other works while the teaching staff and students are no longer on site. As such I thought I would share another “day in the life” similar to my post from January 2022 (A day in the life of a Director of IT).
Start of Day
Have set myself a target of running 65km each month in 2023, trying to build some consistency into my health and fitness efforts. As such it was up and out at 6am for a run. On this occasion my run was cut short at around 3.5km out of my planned 6km due to not feeling 100%, however its still progress considering I lost a weeks worth of running at the start of February due to a heavy cold.
8:30am
In work for around 8:30 which is slightly later than normal, with this being the result of some ongoing roadworks which have now been ongoing for what feels like years. I need to get sorted back in my office following the whole IT department including myself being relocated to the DT department to allow some essential power works to be done on our offices. The first part of the day is quickly catching up on social media posts and looking at my calendar for the day to check what I have on. As its half term the calendar isnt that busy although I have plenty of tasks to work on, so this means my time is very much self-directed rather than directed by meetings and appointments. As we are in the middle of the week, Wednesday, I spend a little bit of time looking towards next week and allocating time for various meetings, preparation and planning and other tasks. This is a weekly task I do to ensure I am always looking ahead and trying to be proactive in my planning as opposed to have to be forever reactive. I have a number of 1:1 meetings planned with various staff so it is at this point
It isnt however long before an impromptu meeting arises to look at events management and how technology can be used in helping plan events in what is a very busy school with lots of things going on, whether its sporting, academic, music, drama, art or other events. This meeting is followed by another meeting looking at inspection compliance and data requirements. In both cases my focus is on trying to identify and simplify processes first before looking at how technology can be used. Applying technology to overly complex processes in the hope of improving things is something I seek to involve as I feel it just created complex technology solutions which in turn tend to be expensive in terms of total cost to support, manage and maintain, but also tend to be fragile and more prone to fail.
11:00am
One of the projects I am working on currently relates to using PowerBi to analyse academic results data. As lunch is approaching I spend a little bit of time playing with my data model to see if I can get the outputs I would like. It becomes clear that some of the data needs to be reprocessed into a slightly different form in order to facilitate the outcomes I am looking for.
Lunch
When working on data exercises or little programming problems time can just disappear so before I know it lunchtime arrives and it is a quick visit to the canteen for some food with this then being eaten at my desk due to the main canteen undergoing some maintenance works. The canteen staff as always do a fantastic job. I particularly enjoy the Tunnocks Caramel Wafers which were on offer. As I have my lunch a bang out a couple of emails in relation to the podcast, “In our humble opinion”, I am working on with Ian Stockbridge ahead of a recording session planned for this evening.
1:00pm
After lunch and I have two main tasks on my to-do list, being continuing working on the PowerBI data analysis and also working on an initial draft of a proposal looking at moving school servers to the cloud.
Within the PowerBI project I find a lovely visual to present value added data comparing students actual grades with predicted grades based on standardised testing. I then however hit a challenge in relation to looking at individual classes in terms of how to model the data. This is something I will need to come back to. And its important to note here that my belief is that data always has context so therefore the data in itself is of limited use without someone able to add the detail in terms of the individual students involved, events which have occurred, etc.
The proposal for a move to the cloud comes together quite well as I look to present the positives and the risks of such a move. It is my firm view that most services will move to the cloud however I recognise that cloud hosting will be more expensive than locally hosting, when viewed over the longer term, however with that come some advantages such as improved scalability and better security functionality. The proposal isnt at this point ready to be presented but it should be ready following a number of revisions and adjustments planned in the weeks and months ahead. This, in my eyes, is a long but important project.
5:00pm
The end of the day has arrived and it is shortly after 5pm I leave for the carpark before driving to the car park which is my route home, inclusive of the ongoing road works. Arriving home and the house is empty as kids are out so it is a couple of quick household chores and some reheated Pizza ahead of jumping on Teams at 8pm to record what will be episode 6 of the “in our humble opinion” podcast with Ian. The episode seems to go quite well and we ended up having a further chat post ending the episode. Following ended the call I quickly upload episode 2 and release it via our website and also via Spotify and other podcast channels.
9:00pm
Finally, the end of the day and a little bit of time watching TV before bed. Currently this involves a number of “classic” 1980’s movies however it isnt long before I am too tired and the TV gets turned off before the movie ends.
Reflections
Half terms seem to go quickly but it is only when you stop and take note of what has been done, as I have done above, that you truly appreciate what is achieved. Normally you simply get to the end of half term, wonder what has been achieved and then are drawn to things yet to do or the tasks which we be required come Monday when the term restarts. But stopping and taking note requires time and when things are busy we often don’t allow ourselves that time. Although reflection is important it is seldom urgent. Maybe this has to change!And it is also worth noting that not all half terms or holiday periods are as busy as this one…..sometimes they are busier.
Technology and Learning