The system supporting the system

Someone told me the other day that many teachers in particular those within the public system are not supported by an adequate standard of IT infrastructure. I have spent the last 15 years of my working life, working within medium sized organisations 200 – 300 employees.  In that time I have become accustomed to an IT network that at a minimum gives me a backup of my emails and network drive. It doesn’t mean that this network is at all stable but at least it is there.

It is disappointing that the system we trust to support educating tomorrow’s engineers, bankers, doctors, nurses and teachers isn’t of a standard most people enjoy even in small business. I couldn’t imagine the amount of information a teacher would hold on their PC. All I remember from my school days was that most of the teacher’s desks were pretty messy and when they came to class, teachers came with a lot of files and paper. I would assume that today’s teachers accumulated 100x or even 1000X that on their PC’s.

Apparently the Digital Education Revolution will pump enough funds into infrastructure to ensure most public schools can step up to a certain standard. Here’s hoping. Its about time the public system caught up with their private brothers/sisters even if it is at a moment in time.

From a personal note, I would love the opportunity to offer all teachers Carbonite even if it was for their home use.  It would atleast ensure that everything they placed on their work PC was at a minimum backed up.  If there are any teachers in Australia out there who are worried that they could lose all of their data because their PC may crash, then please give me a call 1300 886 673 and I will send you a free 90 day trial of Carbonite. Alternatively, download the trial here.

Could someone please let me know if the situation is really that bad or was this guy just trying to sell me advertising space.