Kristin School computes

Kristin School in Brief

• Independent school on Auckland's North Shore established 35 years ago
• Teaches junior, middle and senior students, 99 per cent of whom carry on to tertiary study
• Started a laptop programme for students in 1996 and today has a significant ICT budget and 13 ICT services staff
• Is connected to high-speed KAREN research network
• Has a wireless network accessible from most of its campus

"They're not just computer-literate, they're digitally literate. They know how to search, they know how to synthesise data from many sources and [use it to] create knowledge."

Jason MacDonald, ICT services director Kristin School

If there are doubters remaining about the educational value of ICT in schools, they are on a different planet from the staff and parents of students at Kristin School. Kristin is a 35-year-old independent school in Albany, on Auckland's North Shore, which became a believer in ICT's power as a learning tool more than a decade ago.

Today the school has computing resources that place it among the ranks of the biggest ICT users in the country. With recent expansion, it has an ICT services staff of 13. And it spends a significant sum on ICT each year, a chunk of which goes on several hundred laptops that are provided to middle school pupils.

"We're predominantly a mobile computing-based organisation," says ICT Services Director Jason MacDonald, who has been at Kristin since 2002. And, he adds, an organisation with one of the country's largest populations of mobile users. Its roll call of IBM® servers, desktop computers and mobile devices is about 1500, 1100 of which are Lenovo laptops, supplied by Cyclone Computers. IBM Global Finance plays a key part in the school's hardware purchasing arrangements, including the laptop programme.

Staff and students roaming the school campus can get network access from just about all of its 22 hectares. For high-speed access, there's also an extensive wired network, with a fibre-optic backbone.

Optical fibre makes for fast movement of data within the school network. But better than that, fibre also connects the school to the wider world. Kristin is attached to the Vector-built fibre network on Auckland's North Shore and the eye-wateringly fast KAREN fibre-optic network linking the country's Crown research institutes and universities to other institutions around the world.

Ubiquitous wireless coverage and fibre optic-based networking have been around for some years, of course. But Kristin is a school, not a profit-rich commercial organisation. Yet it has a history of adopting leading technologies long before many corporate users.

It has had a laptop programme for students since 1996, and its wireless networking is third-generation. That means, for instance, that security is centralised and highly controlled, an important issue when students can access the network from all manner of devices, including internet-capable phones.

Physical security of the campus - in the form of access control and video surveillance - also makes use of the network.

More than that, though, the wireless IP network is handling the school's voice calls as well as its data traffic - and has been doing so for about four years. In other words, while VoIP is still a talking point on corporate wired networks, Kristin is already doing it wirelessly.

Having laptops is one thing, but giving them speedy connections to the outside world brings one of the school's key educational goals within reach. "One of our objectives is exposing students to the world. I guess in a way it's making the world flat; it's about primary sources of information."

MacDonald uses the example of a junior school unit on ancient civilisations to illustrate what that means in the classroom. "We had students typing up some notes on their laptops from a big picture book about mummies, through to a group of students who were Skyping with a person who had visited Egypt and was showing them his blog and photos, and another group who were using an interactive whiteboard to - with their hands - fly through the pyramids, accessing high-quality photos and videos of what was actually there.

"It's really exciting to have all those activities going on in a single classroom."

Where does such strength of belief in ICT come from? For MacDonald, it goes back to Acadia University in Nova Scotia, from where he graduated with a Bachelor of Computer Science degree, and which had Canada's first student laptop programme.

But it was also fostered by his father, an academic and university administrator, whom MacDonald says has been a mentor. "He gave me a good understanding of how ICT fits into bigger educational organisations."

Coupled with professional experience in software development and system and business analysis, MacDonald's background equipped him to come up with a method Kristin can use to measure the payback from ICT spending in a non-profit and loss environment.

"We take that seriously because we make a considerable investment in ICT," MacDonald says. The approach was to look at frameworks from around the world, and models developed from the perspectives of business, economics and IT, and blend them into a formula Kristin applies when making a case for ICT investment.

"It's a mash-up of different models into what we call an 'educase' framework that we think is really quite innovative and perhaps even world-leading. Fundamentally it's based on the delivery of educational value."

Quite apart from what the economic model says, the school knows it's on the right track when parents recount the successes of Kristin children in the big wide world. MacDonald recalls the parents of a former Kristin student saying that after their child's first year at university, he was doing extracurricular IT activities at a fourth-year level.

Hands-on ICT learning is supplemented by activities such as a Year 12 visit on WorkChoice Day earlier this year to IBM's Auckland office, where students were exposed to the range of careers in the ICT industry.

"They're not just computer-literate, they're digitally literate. They know how to search, they know how to synthesise data from many sources and create knowledge, which is something students who don't have this sort of enriched, ubiquitous IT environment don't have the same skills in."

Key Business Insights

Every organisation needs to know whether its capital spending - be it on furniture, vehicles or computers - is providing the necessary payback. In the school sector, formal ways of measuring investment effectiveness are not widely available.

Kristin School has devised its own process for justifying investment in ICT, which represents a major portion of its spending on resources. By looking at frameworks in use around the world, and business, economic and IT cost models, it has come up with an "educase" framework to measure the educational value of spending on computers.

Each educase quantifies the capital investment, human resource commitment and professional development cost, and lines those up against key performance indicators, allowing educational value to be systematically assessed. KPIs might include improved student grades, the level of student engagement and staff enjoyment in teaching a particular course.

Educases are then judged by how they fit in with the school's "portfolio of interests". The result, says Kristin ICT Services Director Jason MacDonald, is transparency and clarity in how the school's ICT spend delivers value.

Additional Resources

Kristin School is a pioneering member of the National Education Network, based on the KAREN high-speed research network that links CRIs and universities with other institutions around the world:

National Education Network - Karen wiki

The 2020 Communications Trust is a long-time advocate of getting computers into schools. Here's its latest report on ICT use in New Zealand schools:

• ICT in Schools Report 2007 (5.37MB)
• Get Adobe® Reader®

NetSafe is an organisation supported by the Ministry of Education, among others, whose role is to provide advice about safe use of ICT. With IBM, it has produced a brochure called "First Steps to Cybersafety". NetSafe's website has a section for schools:

NetSafe.org.nz - Education Sector

kristin.school.nz