Dive Brief:

• The 67,000-student Seminole County Public Schools system in Florida has used technology to transform teaching and learning but Tim Harper, chief information officers, said the district’s success depended on replacing aging IT infrastructure.
• Harper writes for eSchool News that the district switched from an expensive, slow, tape-based backup and recovery system to a hybrid array storage platform and cloud-based backup solution that created an immediate improvement for end-users.
• The new setup reduces risk for the district, maximizes its resources and offers secure data backup, ample storage, improved performance, flexibility and a way to achieve smooth operations with the potential for seamless growth.

Dive Insight:

It is more exciting to talk about educational technology and its impact on the classroom than it is to do the methodical work of planning for a successful rollout of new devices and programs. But the infrastructure component is absolutely critical. Moving too quickly on rollout can over-tax systems and create glitches in the classroom that turn both teachers and students off of new initiatives, dampening support when it is most important.

Beyond building time for planning and infrastructure improvements into the timeline for tech initiatives, many districts have found success by starting small. Pilots give IT professionals as well as those on the instructional side a soft launch for broader efforts. Any difficulties are necessarily more contained and glitches can be kept from disrupting an entire school.