The benefits of 1:1 devices in schools

Microsoft 365 User Adoption for Schools, MATs and Districts

In this episode Darren Hemming speaks to Stefan from Lingfield College about the rollout and adoption of 1:1 devices.
Find out more about Cloud Design Box at https://www.clouddesignbox.co.uk

The benefits of 1:1 devices in schools with Lingfield College

The Director of Digital Learning at Linfield College talks about the school’s plan to roll out per-student devices to every student and the challenges and benefits that come with digital transformation.

Lingfield College is a co-educational independent school in Surrey for pupils aged two to eighteen. Stefan Hagen is the Director of Digital Learning and works with his team to help drive digital learning within the school, working with the school’s partner companies – including Cloud Design Box – to deliver quality technology to staff and students.

The school has bold plans to introduce a per-student device policy – eventually rolling out touch-screen laptops to every student within the school.

In this podcast episode, we discuss the challenges of moving to blended learning, as well as the many benefits that come with a 1:1 device policy in education.

Stefan also outlines what the school has done so far to lay the foundations for this digital learning strategy and what the plan is to accomplish their goal of per-student devices.

A vision for cloud-based learning.
Lingfield College had begun looking at ways to “get digital moving”, as Stefan puts it before the pandemic.

But, things didn’t move as quickly as they had hoped and as the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns hit in the UK, the school had to move quickly to deliver quality lessons via Microsoft Teams.

“When we returned to the classroom after lockdown, I was keen to keep the momentum that we had built up going, encouraging staff members to use Teams and OneDrive,” Stefan explains.

“However, I realised that many people were fed up with computer screens and that we had to move more slowly and carefully to get everyone on board.”

It was around that time that Lingfield College began working with Cloud Design Box to create a long-term strategy that would enable the school to migrate to the cloud, which would lay the foundations for their 1:1 device policy.

Moving to the cloud.
“As they say, when you move house, you have a clear out before you move so you don’t take all your junk with you. And, it was the same as we moved from our old servers to the cloud,” Stefan explains.

Cloud Design Box worked with Lingfield College to give staff the time and training they needed to move their resources over to the cloud.

“We set up key milestones and eventually turned the old servers to ‘view-only’ to give staff who hadn’t been able to move resources over yet access without creating a confusing dual system.”

1:1 devices for teachers and school staff.
Moving to the cloud allowed Lingfield College to roll out 1:1 devices for every staff member, allowing teachers to build up their confidence with the new technology.

“This approach made the most sense to us because teachers can get used to the technology as they’re using it for teaching so that when we are ready to roll out 1:1 devices for students, teachers can help resolve some tech issues if they do occur in the classroom.”

Infrastructure challenges that come with 1:1 devices.
As Stefan points out in the podcast, there’s more to think about when rolling out 1:1 devices than simply giving everyone a laptop or tablet.

“Getting the infrastructure right is a challenge. For example, our flooring makes it difficult for us to put charging ports into our classrooms. So we’re now looking at char

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