St Pius X

Malcolm continues to be of enormous support and benefit to our school. He has a great relationship with my tech support team

In 2016  the school staff expressed frustration with the the technology that was made available  for staff and students at St. Pius X. Students were supplied a tablet that was shared across classrooms. There were also problems with lengthy delays getting laptops to boot, numerous screens cracking and keyboard breakages, meant that changes needed to be made. Teachers had no ability to present their screen to an LCD for the class, Surveys showed that the average ‘boot up’ time was 27 minutes.  All of this information was presented to the School Board with a recommendation for an overhaul of the school’s technology.

In 2017 Greg Parker  was employed as the new principal, and upgrade of the schools technology was #2 action on the school’s 2017-2020 Improvement Plan.  Having been principal at a previous school and transforming the technological opportunities for staff and children through introduction of Ipads, Macbooks and software management systems, Greg was more than pleased that the recommendations to the Board was to explore moving to Apple products,  I worked with Greg previously and so he was keen to discuss with me this new challenge.

We talked about what was needed in depth and I recommended a mixture of iPads for years 1 to 4, 1:1 with PC Locs charging stations and MacBook Airs for years 5 and 6, coupled with a protection case for every device to prevent from accidental damage.

Greg spoke to the parents and made the case for going with Apple for the students and got approval to move ahead with these changes. The students provided a major ‘voice’ in the decision to move to Apple products.

St Pius X then placed their order for 109  student MacBook Airs, 35 Staff Macbooks  and 184 iPads.  Every St Pius X staff member now has a MacBook Air.

With this number of laptops and iPads, they needed to be managed by Mobile Device Management (MDM), which is so important to have, to make applications and settings available immediately and deployment of devices seamless.

Since these changes have happened, the iPads and MacBook Air laptops have proven to be reliable and robust in a classroom environment.   Considering they have over 300 devices, breakages have been negligible.

This school is now a 1:1 school.

With the help of personal development the school has made a successful transition to Apple with OzMac Solutions assistance, who also provides hardware support for their devices with a pickup and return service.

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