Teachers have enough on their plates as it is.
Aside from the mammoth task of instructing 20-plus students each day, teachers have a lot of responsibilities of which many students and their families aren’t aware. There’s the teacher who collects tickets at the school basketball game, the one who provides one-on-one instructional support to new teachers, the one who sponsors the school’s student council, and of course, the one who organizes weekend ACT and SAT sessions.
Add technology to teachers’ plates, and it’s easy to see how teachers can quickly burn out, overwhelmed by all of the non-instructional “stuff” that gets in the way of teaching kids. With the right technology support, however, schools can quickly resolve teachers’ common technology issues, prevent those issues from arising in the first place, and potentially save money in the process.
Once teachers don’t have to worry about their SMART Board bulb, projector, or laptop credentials, they can help a student with a particularly tricky math problem, call a parent to give them an update on their child, or even, you know, take a breather in between class periods. Teacher wellbeing directly translates into student wellbeing. Seamless tech. support can help improve both.
Seamless tech. support quickly resolves common tech. issues for teachers.
Imagine a teacher who’s delivering a particularly compelling lesson to a group of rapt students. They’re focused on her, completely silent as she explains the concept; you can almost “see” the learning happening before your eyes. Suddenly, however, the teacher can’t get her laptop credentials to work, preventing her from pulling up a video that was supposed to transition the class to a subtopic within the lesson. Without the proper tech. support, this kind of issue can quickly derail a lesson: the teacher becomes flustered, tries to figure out the issue herself, and students start chatting with one another, disengaging from the instructional content they were once so focused on.
Seamless tech. support can prevent these and other tech. snafus from undermining instructional content by either providing teachers with easy-to-use how-tos for common tech. troubleshooting issues or by offering a responsive tech. help desk that can quickly resolve these issues on teachers’ behalf. Each minute the teacher spends occupied with a technology-related issue is one minute less that she can spend teaching and that students can spend learning. Seamless tech. support minimizes these gaps in instruction to support student achievement.
Seamless tech. support is preventative.
Seamless tech. support can also ensure that these and other tech-related issues don’t arise in the first place. By consistently monitoring a school’s wireless connectivity and critical IT infrastructure, a managed IT team can prevent issues, such as a network outage, from negatively impacting instruction. This kind of support can also help students stay safe online by ensuring CIPA-compliant software is installed on each student device, blocking and filtering certain kinds of sites so that students use their school-issued devices for strictly instructional purposes.
Finally, effective technology support includes regularly monitoring the school’s device inventory to repair or replace student devices ahead of time, ensuring that each member of the school community has the technology they need on day one—and throughout the year—to effectively teach and learn. This process includes thinking about schools’ technology-related needs far in advance: if a school is planning to add a grade level or expand to a new site, seamless tech. support ensures that the procurement process begins early.
Seamless tech. support can be relatively inexpensive.
Of course, many school decisions often come down to cost. Fortunately, seamless tech. support doesn’t have to come at the expense of schools’ fiscal integrity. Rather than having a single IT team member responsible for all of a school’s technology, schools can often hire a full-scale managed IT provider at a comparable or even lower cost.
Doing so not only gives schools a greater number of individuals “responsible” for the school’s IT-related wellbeing but also ensures that all of a school’s technology bases are covered. From E-rate to daily troubleshooting and procurement to end-of-year close-out and beginning-of-year start-up, seamless tech. support ensures that school administrators can focus exclusively on teaching and learning while a dedicated team of IT professionals handles all things technology-related.
At CTS, we take care of the technology so that teachers can focus on instruction.
Our team is deeply invested in the work of our partner schools. We’ve worked with more than 60 schools across the country to offer seamless tech. support at an affordable, predictable rate that makes sense for schools’ budgets. From daily tech. support to high-level strategic road mapping, our team offers a full suite of technology services to schools and allows them to focus exclusively on instruction. Contact us today to learn more about our services and how we can help your school accomplish its unique mission.
