What can be done about tech support?
Doug Prouty – dprouty@cccoe.k12.ca.us
Contra Costa County Office of Education – Pleasant Hill, CA
A listserv for technology coordinators recently had a discussion titled "Barriers to Best Practices." This thread was started by David Warlick and stems from his book, Raw Materials for the Mind - http://www.landmark-project.com/rmfm/toc.html. David mentions three barriers to successful technology integration:
• A lack of teacher preparation time
• The sheer momentum of our industrial-age style education system, which renders it nearly impossible to turn
• The policies and restrictions employed by the district and site technology staff
This naturally sparked a healthy debate and discourse, leading to the question, "How do we technology coordinators provide effective technology support to our schools given a lack of funding and personnel?" Recently, state and federal dollars have reduced the student to computer ratio in the classroom; now the challenge is to increase effective support for users. Over the next few years technology support at the teacher level will either contribute to—or undermine—successful integration of technology into the curriculum.
There’s little debate that school technical staffs are overwhelmed. Private industry usually employs one technician for every 50 to 100 workstations, plus network management personnel. On the other hand, school districts average around 500 machines to 1 technician if they are lucky. I just met with a small district (1400 workstations on seven campuses) that employs two technicians who can address help calls no more than three days a week, and sometimes only one or two days a week. Clearly 1400 workstations cannot be supported effectively by two people this busy (or any two people, for that matter).
From the teacher perspective, the restrictions and policies enforced by our technical staffs often seem to be the fiendish plot of propeller-headed young men and women bent on keeping the teachers from using technology effectively. And yes, many district or technical staff policies—some intended to limit support requests, others designed to follow federal or state directives—can be restrictive to the end-user. For example, a recent struggle facing districts is the newly imposed Internet filtering system. Congress (via the Children’s Internet Protection Act) required the filtering of school Internet access for those receiving federal discounts on networking services and products. Because of such filtering, Web sites that were once used by teachers and students are now blocked. Most systems allow restoring the access to a restricted site only if a teacher makes a specific request. Yet many districts do not have the resources or know-how to solicit, organize, and act on those requests. In this case and others like it, user education is the key to reducing the level of distrust. If a district technology committee helps fashion technology support policies and procedures, and if that committee has a broad base of stakeholders, there is a better chance that policies will be perceived as user friendly.
Because of the possibility for misunderstandings by both district tech staff and teachers, the focus of this article is to suggest solutions that solve, or at least lessen the negative effect of, technology support issues for all stakeholders.
Technical support personnel
In schools there is usually a pecking order where the certificated personnel wield some power over the classified staff. Whenever I work with, or present to educators, I find it important to point out that I was a classroom teacher. This in turn makes them more receptive to what I have to say. A site or district level technician usually does not have this card to play, and though the technician may not be outwardly demeaned by teachers, the relationship is usually strained. Tim Landeck, the technology coordinator for the Alisal school district near Monterey, California suggests that we treat our technicians like gold. Include them in the decision-making processes, pay for the training they need, and work to foster a positive relationship between them and your teachers. If they feel empowered and more like a partner, there will be less distrust from both sides.
If after-hours technology professional development is a feature of your district’s technology plan, are teachers and technology support personnel learning alongside one another—or with support personnel in (paid) teaching roles? The more support personnel and teacher can work side by side and establish relationships, the greater the chance for mutual understanding and respect.
A common technician frustration is that teachers do not recognize workstations as district property. If it is in their room, it is theirs. They can load any software, screen saver, or hardware that they see fit. Doing so of course increases the support needs of the box. Andrew Prestage from California’s Financial Crisis and Management Team states that one of the top 10 issues undermining school technology is ineffective communication, citing that users don’t understand the pressures faced by IT support. And though a teacher may be interested to learn how a technician solved the problem or supported the workstation, there is usually very little patience or skill for one adult to teach the other.
A possible future trend will be the outsourcing of entire district IT departments to larger corporations. Detroit Public Schools is the 10th largest in the country with 22,000 employees, 167,000 students and 28,000 workstations. They have hired a company to take over their IT department. (http://www.mackinac.org/article.asp?ID=3357) "Essentially we hope to improve the quality of the service we provide," said Thomas Diggs, the district’s chief information officer. "We had things we could not do well, because we did not have the personnel. This outside company will improve response time for field services, create a more stabilized network, improve the payroll processing, and improve the help desk in the district." Outsourcing also makes many of Detroit Public Schools’ services E-Rate discountable. (Network maintenance and support is an eligible service only if it is a contracted service handled by people outside of your district personnel.) This could create a huge cost savings if the district’s free and reduced lunch numbers are high.
Workstation Support and Obsolescence
The support cost for a computer kept past its life cycle (five years) increases exponentially. In the world of the classroom, we use computers until they die. I just helped a "poorer" school establish a computer lab from the hand-me-downs from other districts. The average RAM in the resulting lab is 8MB. It is wonderful yet sad to see machines that were headed for the recycling bin now being used by less fortunate students. If you get the opportunity to outfit a new computer lab, consider a package that puts the equipment on a three-year lease. This makes the original purchase cost about 1/3 of what it would be in the first year. If the district or site can commit to that amount yearly, the lease will allow a three-year refresh cycle for that equipment. At the end of three years you can usually buy the computers for $1 each and resell or redistribute them on campus. Most major vendors like Dell, Compaq and Apple have lease programs. The Tucson Unified School District (http://www.tusd.k12.az.us) recently leased their workstations through Eduflex (http://www.compaq.com/education/k12/success/tucsonunified.html). Always require a three-year on-site warranty with your new machines. This is a pretty standard practice now and is worth the money in avoiding future support headaches.
Workstation Software
A single school district may have hundreds of software titles installed. This makes it difficult to inventory, impossible to support. It is best if a technology department can provide a matrix listing all titles allowed with guidelines for the level of support each will receive—some applications simply won’t be supported, and users must be made aware of this. Applications on the list are tested, and any known issues should be included in the matrix. This will help teachers and sites with the purchasing and standardization of software—users who know that little support is available for one vs. another product may take that into account. For computers directly supported by you, try to implement a common software image. If the hardware and drivers are the same, it allows for a failed drive to be easily diagnosed or re-imaged and sent back online. Software programs such as Norton’s Ghost and Phoenix Technologies’ ImageCast are required tech support tools. Time saved by re-imaging a drive—as opposed to troubleshooting and reinstalling individual pieces of software—is worth it.
Standards/Purchasing
To make the software image successful, sites or districts need a standard hardware platform down to the vendor. This is difficult given the practices of schools. Many districts rely on corporate donations and mini grants that bring in all different types of hardware. Still, when you do have the ability to make buying decisions, insist on buying from the major computer makers such as Dell, Compaq, HP, Gateway and Apple and insist on a three-year support contract with each machine. Standardizing on Tier 1 vendors guarantees that you will get standardization within the box, not requiring you to have different drivers for mixed hardware. It is also important to keep all printers to a standard for general maintenance, ink cartridges, laser cartridges, etc. Standardizing and using higher-end vendors will cost more up front but will save you in support hours spent by technicians.
Whenever possible, pick a single operating system and stick with it. This will avoid support headaches. Our office is still imaging new computers with Windows 98, allowing us to have the same OS on over 150 machines purchased over the last four years. Support and training will be our biggest issue when we move to a new OS in the coming year.
Support Procedures
Carlene Ellis, Intel’s Vice President of Information Technology from 1993 to 1999, says "support down the wire" (over a network) represents the most efficient way to provide workstation support. With school networks quickly becoming the most robust and dependable part of a school’s technology, we need to find ways to support our computers over the network. Remote control software like Netopia’s Timbuktu and Novell’s ZenWorks allow us to monitor and handle workstations from one central location. In traffic laden or rural districts it can take a technician more time to travel to a site than it does to solve the problem.
Each district must also have access to an efficient help desk and associated tool. The more efficient the help desk process is, the better the use of everybody’s time. A computer-based tool for help desk calls with a database back end is a must. This will provide a system for record keeping of support needs, a knowledge base of solutions, email communications for status and an escalation procedure. You can get a shareware product developed by Mac Carey from our office at http://www.cccoe.net/hd. The help desk is then accessible via a Web browser and runs on FileMaker Pro, making it easy to set up and deploy across a district. In regular emails to staff or on the Web page where the Help Desk site is located, consider providing an FAQ or "Top 10" most common problems and their solutions. This gives folks a chance to check these items first before alerting a technician. Its always embarrassing when the reason the computer didn’t work was because it was unplugged. Another good resource along these lines is a troubleshooting handbook or laminated card that is placed next to each machine.
Training
Since we are encouraging all users to check the FAQ and/or troubleshooting guide and be the "first line of defense," we should also provide an incentive-based professional development program on basic tech troubleshooting. Perhaps network access or an email account is not activated until a basic course has been completed. Districts could even develop a self-paced, online-accessible training. Technicians often cite end user training as the one thing that would help them the most. Teachers need a basic understanding of the hardware and operating system with tips on file management and system maintenance.
Servers
Server configuration, installation, support and maintenance are all huge, time-consuming tasks. If you have a rock-solid network, consider using server farms or outsourcing some of your servers to Application Service Providers (ASP). Student Information System vendors are beginning to host your SIS data and application on their server(s). The data and program are then accessed through a web browser. The provider will handle upgrades, maintenance, backups, etc. NCS Pearson, who provides SASIxp, provides an outsourcing service called schoolCONNECTxp at http://k12.ncs.com/k12/district/schoolconnect.htm. Products like Novell ManageWise or SMS are helpful for pushing out new software and upgrades over a district network. They also allow for asset management, copyright compliance, and detection of rogue software.
Conclusion
In the past it was obvious that teacher training was our number one barrier to successful technology integration in schools. As we have placed an emphasis on professional development over the past years, and as student-to-computer ratios have dropped, we are beginning to see a frustration coming from our teachers who are trying to make technology an integral part of their classroom. Thanks to E-Rate, grants and general fund spending, we are quickly increasing the amount of technology in schools. This exponential rate of growth is not, however, matched by the rate of growth in districts’ hiring of support personnel. We have a formula that adds up to trouble for our schools and districts. It will be imperative that we implement smart measures that will accommodate the upcoming technology support needs of our users, both in and out of classrooms.
