BEFORE THE CLOUD ERA in educational technology, if you had told me that moving from a handful of computer labs to a one-to-one student laptop model would make my job easier, I would have dismissed the notion as fantasy.

Yet in 2015, when I was the technology director for a 1,600-student school system in New Hampshire, we began our one-to-one rollout of cloud-based Chromebooks to students in grades 3-12, and I witnessed firsthand fantasy become reality. The cloud completely transformed how our IT department maintained the school system’s technology — and not just limited to student devices.

Budgeting, long-term planning, staffing and accessibility of technology in the classroom were significantly affected.

A Service Provider
The cloud effectively serves as an outsourced service provider for a school. The complex systems that historically had been the responsibility of the internal IT department now are contained and supported by a third party such as Google, Amazon or Microsoft. My school district reduced the number of onsite servers from 17 to 3, and the rest of these systems were consolidated and offloaded to the cloud where upgrades, maintenance and backups were taken off our plate. In the case of Chromebooks, no appreciable difference exists between managing 20 or 100 or 1,000, other than the physical demands of moving them around.

Even though we more than tripled the number of student devices in the school system, we saw no correlation of an increase in support by the IT department.

Tier 1 help desk support tasks, such as fixing keyboards, replacing projector bulbs and assisting staff with basic technical questions, remained the same. We did see a reduction in support needs at the tier 3 level of technical support, such as a network administrator or engineer, and at the director level.

Moving to the cloud was like switching from flying manually to autopilot, requiring occasional adjustments, but for the most part a hands-off system maintained by other parties.

Staffing Implications
If the cloud has changed the foundation of how technology is delivered to schools, has your organization made adjustments to reflect this? The current funding environment for public education requires efficiencies to be created wherever possible while avoiding spending cuts that affect student learning.

Many IT departments still are structured for the tech challenges of yesterday, and they operate in a similar mindset. Creating a learning environment where students have near ubiquitous access to technology has been greatly simplified, and school systems should be realizing the benefits from this in the form of reduced costs and/or greater quality.

Say you wanted to provide one-to-one computer access to a school of 500 students before the cloud. In that case, you would have to configure each device, and manage software, updates and antivirus tools with onsite servers to make it function. Today, you need only a pallet of Chromebooks, a spreadsheet with student names and an internet connection.

This isn’t to say you no longer need an IT department or technical expertise and guidance, but in the cloud era you may need less or different kinds of support.

In my school system at the time, we transitioned from an IT department that was always fighting to keep up with demands to one that was able to reduce staffing and reallocate resources for positive change elsewhere.

It can be difficult for school administrators to make these assessments on their own, but it’s undeniable that the cloud has made the job of delivering technology in schools easier and more efficient.


WARREN LUEBKEMAN, a consultant in educational technology, is founder of the Cebrius Group in Peterborough, N.H. Twitter: @cebrius1