Microsoft Technology Blueprint for Primary and Secondary Schools
The Microsoft Technology Blueprint for Primary and Secondary Schools aligns educational objectives to the core technology infrastructure that schools require to support these objectives. Supporting documentation is located in the Microsoft Download Center.
The Microsoft Technology Blueprint for Primary and Secondary Schools provides guidance to assist educational institutions in fully utilizing their current technology and migrating from their current state to a more efficient and effective institution. Because each school has unique issues, priorities, and resources, no general Technology Blueprint can be expected to address the specific needs of all schools. Although educational institutions have very specialized requirements, many lessons that have been learned in the business world can apply to the needs of educational institutions.
School Challenges
Schools face a tremendous amount of technical challenges, some of which are similar to businesses whereas many are different. Focus groups of educators have summarized some of the general challenges to be:
Raising academic standards/lack of visibility into student progress
All education stakeholders require some ability to assess student learning. Regional officials need to be able to assess the overall effectiveness of the education programs. School administrators need to know how well students are doing at their schools. Student progress data can assist decision makers in making changes to the curriculum and to teaching. Accurate, timely and integrated data can assist school administrators and superintendents in understanding the relationships between direct expenditures, indirect expenditures, and student performance.
Business management: Inefficient operations and a lack of insight into where money is spent
With scarce resources, highly diverse and specialized funding for special needs children, grants, capital funds, etc, schools must manage resources efficiently and provide funding agencies with reports on how and where funds were spent. These funds are used to purchase a myriad of items from pencils, food, or large equipment, to major capital improvements that require substantial detailed accounting. Finally, because of government regulations and local community scrutiny, there is a need for clear, easily readable reports.
Communication and access to information for parents and students
Successful educational institutions find that strong communications among schools, classrooms, students, parents, and communities are essential. School announcements such as the school calendar, testing, sports, parent meetings, policy changes, and staff changes help parents stay connected to the educational institution.
Curriculum and lesson sharing among educators
Successful educational institutions find substantial success when they are current in world changes, education trends, and resources. There is a great need to facilitate the communication systems between peer institutions, schools and the world.
Key Concepts Within the Blueprint
The Blueprint is designed to help IT support staff and education decision makers plan for IT upgrades for schools. In addition, the Blueprint provides a means for staff to identify gaps in their environment that prevent them from moving forward with plans to increase the use of technology in schools, as well as to identify where additional technology gains can be made with the existing deployments. Finally it provides the foundation for a scalable, safe computing environment upon which the school can build additional services.
The Blueprint uses the Infrastructure Optimization (IO) Model for Core Infrastructure as its basis. Although the IO model has multiple levels, the majority of the Blueprint focuses on moving from the Basic level to the Standardized level and from the Standardized level to the Rationalized level. Studies suggest that the majority of schools are in the Basic level. The IO model is comprised of the following levels:
| • | Basic. Schools at the Basic level rely on manual, localized processes, have minimal central control, and lack enforced IT policies and standards for security, backup, image management and deployment, compliance, and other common IT practices. |
| • | Standardized. At the Standardized level, schools maintain standards and policies to manage desktops and servers, to control the way computers are introduced into the network, and use Active Directory to manage resources, security policies, and access control. |
| • | Rationalized. At the Rationalized level, the costs involved in managing desktops and servers are at their lowest and processes and policies have been optimized to play a large role in supporting the school. |
| • | Dynamic. The Dynamic level is characterized by IT systems that are self-managing and dynamic. When educational institutions reach this level, IT teams capture and use knowledge to design and deploy manageable systems and automate ongoing operations using system models. |
Self Assessment
Prior to implementing any of the recommendations within the Blueprint, IT staff should perform an assessment of the environment to see where they fall within the IO model. Microsoft has a simple online self-assessment tool that IT staff can use to determine the organization's optimization level. The tool asks a series of "yes" or "no" questions and based on the responses produces a Web page output of the results. The following graphic shows an example of the simple chart that the self assessment tool produces.
This results chart shows that the Identity and Access Management capability is in Standardized, whereas the other capabilities remain in Basic. Because of these results, the staff would focus on moving the other three capabilities to Standardized.
To perform a self assessment, see the Core Infrastructure Optimization Web site.
Overview
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