A New Year’s Resolution
I’m not a big believer in New Year’s resolutions but as I tweeted shortly after the bongs struck to welcome 2010 – writing more is something I’m going to stick to this year. Not only that, I’m going to encourage everyone here to do the same. We do some amazing work through RTS but all too often we don’t shout enough about it (and although we cherish thank you notes from our clients, they shouldn’t be the only impetus for us talking about our project work).
New Year is always a time for reflection and the last 12 months have been incredibly busy at RTS (and saw my first anniversary with the company in November). There have been times where I’ve felt we’ve been a little too ‘heads-down’ rather than participating in the wider education-technology community. We’re addressing this directly with our appearance at BETT and an additional announcement just ahead of the show – watch this space…
In 2009 we moved our entire company ‘in to the cloud’ (or for those who don’t like jargon – ‘on to the internet’). Making the move has afforded us a far more flexible approach to working with access to all of the same data and applications on client sites as if we were sat next to a server in the office. Our telephones are also cloud-based and we can connect in to the system to make and receive calls wherever we have an internet connection, a bit like Skype. All of this means we now spend more time on-site with our clients and less time cooped up in the office.
We did some great proof of concept work too; showing why virtualisation and shared storage were so important for schools, built our take on what exemplary education digital signage looks like, refined our classroom AV offering and looked at how digital telephony could be used by educational institutions to improve both internal and external communication. We also took part in our first joint venture to develop resource management software specifically for schools, which we’ll be launching at BETT.
2010 is going to be an exciting year in education technology with many schools stabilising their virtual learning platforms, seeing the increasing demand for and effects of off-site / mobile computing and looking for ways to spend wisely with maximum return for their students in light of budget constraints.
The move to the virtual world will continue to increase and a real requirement for identity federation will emerge to enable seamless user transition and reduce administrative overhead between systems. Microsoft’s Live@edu is looking promising and their move to make SharePoint 2010 available will be revolutionary. Consolidation of internal servers using virtualisation technologies will become the norm now early adopters have experienced the initial pain.
There also needs to be an end put to suppliers who continue to trail wires across learning spaces, site amplifiers on teaching desks and install projectors badly. Expect to see even more from us on the model classroom and larger, completely immersive learning environments.
Look forward to seeing you at BETT, stand W45…
Mike
