So, Monday this week marked the first day of the Autumn term and the new 2023/24 academic year and it was the usual very busy start to the year for myself and my team. I suspect IT teams working in schools, colleges and universities across the world will find it the same when staff and students return. Forgotten passwords, new devices, new requirements and services, the fog of the summer holiday period meaning people cant remember how to do or find things on the schools intranet or learning platform. All of these issues suddenly appear on day 1 and the first week, meaning from an IT point of view it is probably the busiest period of the year. As such I thought I would share some of myself and my teams day.
Lots of issues continue to be reported via email as email is a fire and forgot medium. As such a fair part of my day was spent reviewing and responding to emails. Despite my best efforts, by the end of the day my inbox contained around 300 emails yet to be reviewed or requiring action; I try to only keep the emails in my inbox where they are unread or where they require action. I hate to think how many emails would be in my inbox if I hadn’t allocated small amounts of time throughout the day to review and action.
Part of the schools programme at the start of the year involves a school service at a local cathedral. This is always an amazing event and a great way to start the year. This was due to happen on the Tuesday however over the weekend the actual programme for the service had yet to be finalised. As such I popped down to our reprographics office to provide some support to our reprographics manager who would be responsible for trying to turn around thousands of printed programmes within the day. As it was the finalised programme arrived just after 9am with the whole run completed by mid-afternoon thanks to the hard work of the reprographics manager. Meanwhile my creative technologies team were in the cathedral itself getting all the audio visual equipment in place to allow for screens to help attendees see clearly what was happening even if sat at the back, to allow for recording of the whole event and to provide the necessary audio setup. The whole event is quite a logistical endeavour however is brilliant in marking the start of a new academic year.
Back in the office and the team are hard at work supporting users including both staff and students. A quick look at the IT ticketing system at the end of the day shows almost twice as many tickets being logged as is usual and this doesn’t include a record of the many students and staff who simply physically came to the IT office for help. Issues ranged from new students not knowing how to log in to the Wi-Fi, students having forgotten passwords, staff and students with new devices where their old device was the one setup for MFA, and many other issues. If variety is the spice of life, there was certainly plenty of variety in the issues, albeit there were also a fair few of the usual issues common for IT teams at the start of a new academic year.
As part of a new project this year we had a photographer in doing photos for a number of our year groups rather than my team being involved in this. Just after lunch I popped across to see how they were getting on given they had around 700 to 800 photos to do within the day. As it was the company confidently worked their way through the students, largely due to their experience in doing the same with other schools, and the new photos were uploaded to our school management system before the end of the first day.
I had also put aside some time on day 1 for a couple of more significant projects. I find if I don’t allocate time to significant projects, other less pressing issues seem to deplete my available time. One of these projects is in relation to some data analysis using PowerBi. I continue to see PowerBi as such a powerful tool and can only see this growing over time as we gather more and more data, but need to find value in the data, where BI can help us visualise and explore the data and therefore hopefully find the value we seek. The second project I was working on was in relation to a conference I will be speaking at later in the month where I will be discussing AI in education. I had some rough thoughts on the content of the presentation but had put some time aside to flesh these out noting that the organiser is asking for a presentation to be provided in the next week. I will admit I have a tendency to be working on conference presentations until minutes before I present, and I suspect this may be no different.
The day finished with a meeting discussing data and data analysis, setting things up for a meeting the following day to further explore the data and analysis requirements.
It was a long and busy day but also a productive one in many ways. And this is all after a busy summer of IT infrastructure upgrades, client device changes and upgrades, systems development and other IT works. The rest of the week will be similarly busy before things settle down a bit in week 2 and 3 as staff and students get into routines and as everything returns to the usual habits, ebbs and flows of a busy school.
I hope all staff in IT roles in schools, colleges and universities survive their first days back and come out of it with minimal issues. You all do a great job, often invisible to most users in the school, except when things go wrong. This is the way of IT, if done correctly it is nearly transparent to the users, simply being there and adding new possibilities to teaching, learning, school administration, etc. Without you this wouldn’t happen, so keep up the great work!
Technology and Learning