It’s big, it’s complex. It’s not easy for just any expert to manage. In fact, CESA had been on a journey of deploying Office 365 in schools, but the SharePoint component proved to be the hardest element in school implementation.
While CESA has always sought to empower their schools with seamless, enabling technology, the sheer logistics of rolling out the cloud platform seemed to be outweighing the benefits.
The challenge was not simply a matter of user adoption, but more fundamentally, scale of deployment. The complex nature of SharePoint and the lack of onsite technical knowledge in the construction of its information architecture remained an ongoing issue for schools, consequently impeding the successful roll out of online purposeful, collaborative digital school sites.
The necessity for embracing digital pedagogies to aid in developing students’ 21st century skills is the driver for innovative, contemporary classroom teaching practices. The ubiquity of mobile technologies and its impact on the delivery of learning, demanded a sector response in supporting schools to meet the challenges – financial, technical and pedagogical – in creating a technology layer that enabled access to an online space for school, staff and student engagement.