My name is Chris Powell and I am the Sales Lead for BT’s Education Cloud Services (ECS) proposition.
What is Education Cloud Services?
ECS is a catalogue of services that allows education establishments to move an increasing amount of their school’s ICT to the cloud, allowing the school to benefit from expert ICT engineering talent so the school can focus on teaching and learning. Services include desktops, applications, content, storage, web filtering, etc.
How will Education Cloud Services impact my school?
There are many benefits with ECS, however schools are telling us that a key benefit is that learners and teachers can use their own computers to access the entire school's desktop in the classroom, from home or even mobile. This will have a profound difference on improving learning outcomes. Teachers will be better equipped to introduce modern teaching techniques such as flipped classroom, the learner to computer ratio will be significantly improved during lessons, and it will provide more opportunity for learners to adopt their own personal learning styles.
Why is this the right time for Education Cloud Services?
They say that timing is everything and this is perfect timing for a cloud based service such as ECS. BT’s superfast networks are nearing completion with over 90% of premises in the UK having access to fast, low cost broadband, even in rural areas, and this is still improving.
Cloud services are now mature and schools are looking for a broader range of services. Most schools have experienced cloud services already such as Microsoft Office 365 or Google Apps for Education. These schools see the benefit of having their communication and collaboration tools, office productivity applications and user documents available from any device anywhere. The frustration has been that the entire school's desktop is not accessible in the same way. ECS provides this natural next step in the cloud journey. Ubiquitous access to the entire school's desktop from any device, anywhere.
Is my school ready for Education Cloud Services?
We believe schools themselves are in the best position to answer this, however some help and guidance is at hand to help. SWGfL, working with BT, have produced a free online readiness tool that helps you to evaluate your schools’ cloud provision and develop your strategy so that it truly transforms teaching and learning.
The tool is simple to use and provides reports giving clear advice at every stage on how to make the next step in your journey. Why not have a look at http://rethinkcloud.org.uk
How do I found about more about Education Cloud Services?
To find out more information go to www.bt.com/ecs
