St Michael’s device strategy has culture at its heart

July 9, 2024

Microsoft Australia

“This is a tool for learning.” These words lie at the heart of how St Michael’s Grammar School in St Kilda in Melbourne reframed from a technology-led device strategy to a learning-led device strategy. Rather than asking what devices Years 7-9 students and teachers should have, the school asked a more meaningful question:

How can devices be purposeful and deliberate in enabling authentic, secure and inclusive technology use?

As a result, 450 students shifted from Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) to a 1:1 device end-to-end management approach with every student provided a Microsoft Surface Pro, plus 160 Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio devices for Senior School teachers and specialised roles.

Fast forward three years of phased changes and St Michael’s is reflecting on how this strategy became a pivotal component in the celebration of the School’s culture and an enabler of St Michael’s ability to prepare and empower its students for the future.

School culture is one force. The digitised world is quite another.

St Michael’s is a co-educational school known for being progressive, where creativity, flexible problem solving and empowerment are valued and students are nurtured to become positive, contributing citizens. There’s a clear commitment to the collective wellbeing of students and staff, notably through its pastoral care program.

School culture is one force. The digitised world is quite another.

Bringing these two forces together for the benefit of students, teachers and parents, hinged on the amplification of one critical need – security and safety.

Matt Heinrich, Director of Learning Technologies & ICT at St Michael’s explains: “Access to technology is, and should be ubiquitous, but there’s a really important distinction to this, which is around it being used with purpose. For us, that means being in alignment with our Teaching, Learning and Caring framework. It’s about students having the opportunity to co-design, collaborate, communicate and develop critical literacy and citizenship with flexibility and a sense of autonomy. Also, recognising we’re doing students a real disservice if we’re amplifying their voice without giving them the right tools and knowledge that provide the guardrails, so they are safe and secure.”

“Moving out of the pandemic, innovation became about continuing to empower students to connect meaningfully online whilst making sure our environments are incredibly safe. There’s an alignment and benefit that comes with our whole community leveraging the suite of Microsoft tools. That’s a beautiful balance of opportunity and possibility,” continues Mr Heinrich, “we recognised the flexibility and productivity affordances that Surface enables around optimising creativity and personalised learning.”

Putting community at the heart

Parents came out of the pandemic looking for more support from the School around device management. Their ideal was for the School to provide a fully featured device with comprehensive support. “There’s a consistency and equity to this approach which aligns with our culture. We want to ensure that no student is disadvantaged from engaging in impactful learning experiences,” confirms Mr Heinrich. That push for a high quality, robust, secure device came with an understanding from the School that there needed to be a great deal of responsibility and trust around these devices. The communications to parents became grounded in the simple message: this is a tool for learning.

The voice of parents and focus groups with students also inspired another key change that had a direct positive impact on teaching and learning practices – shifting administrator rights to the ICT team.

Students want agency in their learning, and the removal of their administrator rights was managed so that students would not view this as disempowering. This element of the change management for students was critical but was also underpinned by empathy – many seeking support in a shift in their relationship with technology and a refocus on their engagement in class with teachers and peers. “These are some of the practicalities of ensuring the devices are optimised for learning,” says Greg Plum, ICT Manager, “and whilst some concerns were raised, it was important to frame these changes in alignment with aspects of our culture, commitment to student safety and organisational cyber security. I think because we took that approach primarily focused on learning and wellbeing, the change was not as challenging as we imagined it would be.”

Teachers were deeply engaged in the staff device strategy in 2023 and valued as key decision influencers on which devices the School should invest in for their productivity.

“We have passionate, collaborative, highly professional educators that want to be guided to evolve their practices. They wanted to actively engage in the review process,” says Mr Heinrich, “and I would say that when it comes to the suite of Microsoft tools for Education, like OneNote Notebooks or Teams, they seek to squeeze out every piece of functionality and be on the front foot of what’s emerging.”

The process started with an online survey to set a baseline of what mattered to teaching and non-teaching staff across core mindset, skillset and toolset themes. Then came the collaborative dialogue phase, followed by device testing. This focused on practical hands-on testing with staff and technical reviews of specifications and performance.

Engaging the Executive team centred on the ICT team mapping the investment to the commitment to staff feedback, productivity and professionalism, grounded in a commitment from the School’s published vision ‘Strategic Direction: Towards 2030’: “We will value our staff and support them to realise the highest levels of collaborative professionalism, productivity and individual accountability.” The outcome of this robust process was a role-based device allocation: Microsoft Surface Laptop 5, was rolled out to 95 Junior School teachers and Educational Support staff, and Microsoft Surface Studio for 160 Senior School teachers and specialised roles.

After 30 days of using their new Surface devices, the results exceeded all expectations with high ratings across performance and speed, display/screen quality, and battery life.

“I am grateful for the time, effort and thoughtfulness that has gone into engaging with colleagues throughout the process and selecting optimal devices for a large staff. The functionality is incredible – particularly the ability to annotate texts in English and seamlessly provide personalised feedback!” 7-12 Teacher, St Michael’s Grammar School.

This is all a great reminder that any big change to a school’s ICT and device strategy needs deep engagement with staff. It’s crucial for success.

Benchmarking a seamless rollout

For the ICT team, a seamless rollout leveraged Microsoft for modern deployment with the support of Microsoft Surface Partner, Compnow.

“By choosing Surface, it’s made our Intune deployments a better experience because of the visibility between the devices and the platform. At the start of February this year, we swiftly had 250 staff and over 150 student devices rolling out and the experience was the best it’s ever been. Knowing we’re using devices that are designed around the modern deployment experience, that’s confidence building,” confirms Mr Plum. This was reinforced by teachers’ survey feedback with the personalised device collection and the transition process with the ICT team receiving an impressive feedback score of 4.89 out of 5.

Another important aspect of a seamless rollout is skilling and readiness. St Michael’s leveraged the Microsoft resources available to them like presentation kits and their internal dedicated learning technologies coach ensures a contextualised focus on building the capacity and skills of staff with sustained coaching.

Ultimately, having technology partners committed to the School’s success has been pivotal to the overall process, as summed up by Mr Plum: “Part of the confidence for me, I suppose, is that Microsoft is a technology company, not an advertising company. And I know that they’re there to build technology that works and works well. And having a healthy balance of advocacy and support behind us from both Microsoft and a procurement partner in Compnow, that’s fairly unique in the landscape of technology partners.”

Empowering students

Putting Surface Pro devices in the hands of Years 7-9 at St Michael’s Grammar School has proven empowering. From robotics, to how students create multimodal content, to inking, voice notes and real-time feedback in OneNote; students are using Microsoft learning tools in combination with Surface Pro’s functionality to consolidate learning and embrace the ease of digital collaboration.

“We’re encouraging our students to not view innovation as hanging upside down and putting a virtual reality headset on, but instead really thinking around what brings accelerated growth and new capabilities. Many of our students have designed new applications and solved problems within the School and more broadly. It’s about putting the tools in their hands that allow them to do that,” reflects Mr Heinrich.

This year has seen a great example of this in action. A Year 11 student proactively built the entire St Michael’s campus to-scale in Minecraft: Education Edition. From the cherished crossing supervisor to intricate classroom details, it’s become an extensive collaborative project that has brought in many students.

“During eSmart Week, we showcased this work with around 100 Year 2 to Year 6 students, all interacting safely within this Minecraft world. The creativity and excitement was palpable, and now their teachers have been inspired to reimagine learning experiences on sustainability as well as scaffolding inquiry-based learning with the use of Minecraft. We even filmed some drone footage to capture the tops of the buildings to further support the accuracy of the world. It’s just incredible and most importantly it’s been codesigned by students, for students,” says Mr Heinrich.

This focus on empowerment and equity of access to digital tools at St Michael’s is also reflected in the work done by the Learning Services team in supporting students with learning difficulties. “We spend significant time in upskilling the whole community in the learning tools within Microsoft like Immersive Reader and the hardware-based accessibility features,” says Mr Heinrich, “and the benefit is it normalises the use of these tools for all learners. It’s empowering and also reflects our ingrained values of dignity, respect, care and compassion.”

Towards 2030

The technology decisions St Michael’s Grammar School is making now are connected to the future it envisions for its students and teachers through its strategic path to 2030.

Gerard Houlihan, Head of the School, explains: “St Michael’s has a rich history of leading technology use since our first computer lab in 1983 and laptop device program in 1998. We remain committed to making investments in technology that are sustainable, viable, and impactful for the future. Likewise, I am proud that we continue to embrace emerging technologies, as with the ethical use of AI, using a constructive and purposeful approach co-designed with our students. Our learning and business practices are data informed, so we will continue to develop our capabilities in key areas of digital transformation, such as intelligent environments, by building out our Microsoft Fabric landscape.”

And while the School is taking confident steps towards that future, it remains acutely focused on what empowers teachers and students today through a cohesive learning-led device and technology strategy.

Mr Heinrich shares a unique perspective on why this is important: “Imagine digital experiences being like supermarkets in cyberspace. Students and teachers constantly having to select and navigate between different supermarkets to source ingredients. You lose sight of the meal you’re actually trying to cook, it’s cognitively draining. And the joy of constructing the meal can be lost. So, for us, it’s about strategically defining our use of technology around a curated landscape of tools – both hardware and software – that provide students and teachers with everything they require to maintain their focus on learning and wellbeing.”

Great advice for any strategy. Don’t lose sight of the meal you’re trying to make and remember that every great meal needs great ingredients.