The Southport School (TSS), is an independent, Anglican, day and boarding school for boys, located in Southport, a suburb on the Gold Coast of Queensland. Established in 1901, TSS is the oldest Anglican boys' boarding school in Queensland and the only all-boys boarding school on the Gold Coast. The school has a non-selective enrolment policy and currently caters for approximately 1305 students from Pre-school to Year 12.
The Southport School has a Registered Training Organisation arm that has the Certificate III in Business on scope. The qualification is delivered to around 40 college-aged learners, with 7 staff members in a simulated work environment on site. Learners undertake work placement as part of their course and use their own devices to access their learning materials both on- and off-campus. The school and RTO use Moodle as it’s Learning Management System and Mahara for E-portfolios. The RTO also uses cloud based resources for learning and teaching, include Google Docs for collaboration and sharing.
The Southport School has a school-wide mandatory BYOD policy from Year 8 onwards. The school does not differentiate between the RTO and non-RTO sides of the school with respect to the BYOD approach and employs a similar learning and teaching approach for VET and school.
The mobile learning adoption began in 2011 when TSS gained a grant under the former Digital Education Revolution program initiated by the Rudd government to trial the use of 30 iPads in Year 9 classes. TSS engaged the support of an e-learning subject matter expert to provide professional development to the whole teaching staff in an ongoing manner, with a focus on ensuring that pedagogy and learning was at the core of the BYOD and Technology-enhanced learning approach. After further testing using 200 iPads, and later a further 200 Windows-based Netbooks, the school adopted a BYOD policy.
The Southport school have adopted a very unique but simple solution in order to bring their school to a true BYOD environment. A lot of time was spent on reworking their entire physical and wireless network to be able to handle up to 1500 wireless devices. This meant running fibre throughout the school for the network backhaul and enterprise wireless solutions to cover both inside and outside of the school with WiFi. The network itself is basically run like a large home network. They have used enterprise grade NAT routers to handle each device independently and no proxy servers are used. They have two very large internet pipes into the school via the AARNet network giving them 2 Gbit of internet connectivity. So they could truly be BYOD and at the same time allowing every student the same experience regardless of what device they used, large virtual desktop servers were introduced. These allow any device to log into a terminal server session and execute any application on the remote computer, for example Adobe photoshop. In order to be able to handle large numbers of remote desktop sessions they have recently upgraded their server infrastructure to use VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) VDI facilitates optimal use of hardware by enabling access to multiple Windows environments (Dev—Test, Business—Personal) from the same client device.
“If you want to run a genuine BYOD environment, you need to support every device. We found that our remote desktop solution just wasn’t there. We weren’t happy with it. This year, we’ve rolled out VDI, which was much better. It’s more compatible across every device, and the performance is much better. As we consolidated fixed labs, we put more back in infrastructure. It hasn’t been a money saving exercise. It’s a bit of a money reallocation exercise”
Richard Humphreys, Director of ICT, The Southport School
Because of the dynamic BYOD environment the southport school adopted, software licensing had the potential to be a huge problem. It was decided to implement a blanket policy of only using software vendors that offered site licenses or subscriptions and not restrictions based on concurrent sessions or potential maximum sessions. This allows the school to run completely legitimately with all software vendors and minimising large amounts of administration and auditing of the software licensing. This also allows the school to budget very accurately for their ongoing software costs
As the first trials began the IT department quickly realised that they needed to find a wireless solution that could handle large amounts of devices simultaneously and if necessary many devices in a small area. The solution was to use WiFi access points form a company named Xirrus Networks who have a very well respected reputation for being able to deliver high performance wireless solutions for high density situations.
After issues with certificates and authentication, TSS purchased a signed Unified Communications Certificate, which is a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate that secures multiple domain names and multiple host names within a domain name.
The school has the philosophy that it is more constructive to educate its learners in appropriate usage, than to block them from using the school network as this does not reflect life in the workforce. Considering that students can connect to 3G or 4G using their devices, duty of care towards the students can be further exercised by instilling good online habits in its learners, particularly those undertaking the VET program. TSS has taken a pro-active approach to instructing learners in Digital Citizenship, embedding instruction for positive usage into learning and teaching practice across the school, alongside enforcing their Internet Use Policy. They report that through constant education of learners and learning and teaching staff, the school has had little trouble with classroom management or any vexatious behaviour online.
All Years 8 to 12 students are required to bring a suitable device to access during classes, as specified by the school in the BYOD Specifications policy. Prior to beginning the BYOD program, the learners were already bringing their own devices to school, and there has been little issue with access to devices at TSS. Boys may BYOD or may access a TSS Netbook or iPad with a refundable deposit of $400. Students’ and staff members’ own devices are moderately supported, in that the ICT department provides a degree of assistance if someone experiences difficulties when accessing learning materials or software through the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.
Roughly half of the learners at TSS had iPhones. These had the capability to interact with the LMS, however, the teaching staff had concerns about whether the screen size was sufficient for students to engage with their learning appropriately, and whether phones could be used effectively if they did not have standard word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software TSS BYOD specifications were devised to address this issue, which states that:
“The device screen needs to be at least 7 inches (measured diagonally by convention). The device must have office software such as a word processor (Word, Pages), a spreadsheet (Excel, Numbers) and presentation software (PowerPoint, Keynote).”
TSS BYOD Specifications Policy
Students are permitted to browse the web using or communicate using phones, provided that they also have a device that meets the requirements of the BYOD Specifications Policy.
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