What does IT really look like in our schools?

The corona pandemic has now firmly arrived in Germany. Recently, the first district closed its schools indefinitely.

 

-A guest article from Martin from Kies-Media GmbH-

And now everyone involved is wondering what the IT infrastructure is actually like in our schools? – The government has passed the digital pact for schools, but somehow nothing seems to have changed in the situation. Let's take a closer look at the situation.

The “Digital Pact for Schools” from the federal and state governments aims to improve the IT equipment in schools. Five billion euros are available for this. That's around €125,000 per school. But somehow nothing happens in our schools?

Who actually wears the hat?

According to a promotional video from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the initiative should come from the teachers of a school. What the video doesn't mention is the age structure of our teachers: Most of the teachers are over 50 years old . One might get the idea that the interest in starting another major project so “shortly before the end” is at best optimistic. In addition, people of this age grew up without IT and therefore (usually) have little IT knowledge. Why should a teacher who has taught for 30 years without the Internet, PCs, whiteboards, etc., upset everything again? Motivation is particularly stimulated when you know that the teacher doing the planning is supposed to do the whole thing in his or her own time, without any payment.

The media plan – the bureaucratic monster

In order for a school to receive funding, it must submit a so-called media plan, consisting of the following parts: “pedagogical strategy”, “technical requirements” and “further training plan for teachers”.

the pedagogical plan would have to be created by any teacher in his or her free time and contain a precise explanation of why the requested IT is necessary at the respective school. The technical requirements contain precise plans of what exactly should be implemented. However, such a plan can only be created with in-depth IT knowledge. Since this knowledge is usually not available, the school would have to hire an external planner. If you know that schools are already overwhelmed when it comes to setting up a drinks dispenser or financing copy money, you can imagine what the pre-financing situation is like for external planners. The costs of planning are not covered by the funding program.

The further training plan includes all measures that are necessary so that teachers can use their IT properly. Since the IT knowledge of most teachers is almost zero, further training is not just a matter of “one-day intensive training”. The teachers would need basic training lasting several weeks, which, in addition to IT topics, also includes topics related to data protection, copyright, etc. If you know that a very large proportion of all lessons are already canceled due to a lack of teachers, you can imagine how motivated the director is to send his teachers to additional comprehensive training.

How are our school buildings actually doing?

Most school buildings date from a time when the Internet etc. was unthinkable. That's why, of course, they don't contain any modern cabling , let alone modern cable ducts. This makes the subsequent laying of cables very complex and therefore expensive. The school can have the costs of any renovation work reimbursed by the project sponsor, but this obviously reduces the IT budget considerably.

An alternative to cabling would be WiFi . Unfortunately, WiFi does not work well in most school buildings because they are made of thick reinforced concrete. Another problem is that operating a large WLAN (for several hundred or thousand students) in particular requires an experienced administrator to constantly monitor the WLAN (especially security). The ongoing costs for future maintenance are not part of the funding program, but would have to be borne by the (cash-strapped) municipalities.

The last main problem lies in the internet connection of our schools. The office usually has a standard household DSL connection. But when it comes to allowing multiple classes to work in parallel with learning apps , DSL is not very suitable. Every school would need a fiber optic connection. Getting these is difficult. On the one hand, not every network operator even offers the option, and if they do, they do so at horrendous prices.

Conclusion: digital pact

The federal and state governments have recognized that years of ruining our schools is not a permanent solution. Attempts are now being made to raise the schools onto a modern foundation using enormous amounts of money. Unfortunately, the DigitalPakt is practically unusable. Bureaucracy, no responsible people and completely unsuitable school buildings make it difficult for schools to advance digitalization.

Author: Martin works at a software development company in Suhl and in his free time deals with many topics relating to data protection, IT ethics and generally everything that makes a computer scientist happy.

Article image: Shutterstock / CrispyPork