Cisco sets girls' school on steep learning curve

Providing the nerve centre of PLC’s Senior School Centre is a communications solution from Cisco combining presence, unified communications and several other best-of-breed business tools designed to support one of the most sophisticated learning environments ever deployed at a high school anywhere in the world.

PLC is as well the biggest in Australia with 2000 students all the way from kindergarten up to year 12. More than half of these students have a laptop, with a similar proportion having a least a standard mobile otherwise a more powerful smart phone.

According to PLC’s head of IT, Rathika Suresh, the research requirements of a school are similar in many ways to those of any commercial organisation, whereby the ability to instantly communicate and share information without physical boundaries translates into superior results. "Our core business is education," she says. "However what we do with the innovation has to make economic sense."

Complementing Show and Share, Cisco Digital Media signage facilitates a richer collaborative experience between students and teachers, combining a broad range of materials. Communications are delivered instantly and after a fashion which is scalable up and down.

The deployment saw the addition of Cisco telepresence

Phase two of the deployment saw the addition of Cisco telepresence, which combines high-quality video and audio to provide a virtual meeting experience replete with direct eye contact, body language and other features of direct physical communication.

Also coming on stream later this year are Cisco Unified Communications and Cisco Unified Computing System supporting advanced voice services with telephony, paging, voicemail, applications for broadcast messaging and parental notification and more.

Suresh expects this will lead to lower overall cost of ownership, increased agility as then as investment surety once the various communication systems are virtualised within a at once- generation, integrated data centre.

The Wi-Fi network

Teachers already have cordless VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phones from Cisco running over the Wi-Fi network and Suresh says the short-term plan is to have around 200 UC handsets. The schools will also before long be taking possession of a handful of Cisco’s new enterprise-oriented Cius tablets.

While the solution at PLC is highly sophisticated by education standards, it is as well more advanced than that currently available at many similar sized businesses. The uniqueness of the deployment in a word demanded PLC approach the project with caution so the needs of teachers and students were properly addressed.

The school worked with Cisco via two of the company’s partners, UC specialists iVision and networking integrator Somerville.

While iVision was largely concerned with the video side, Somerville provided the UC solution which encompassed switching, delivery of the wireless network, LAN management as then as call manager, communications manager, unified voice mail and presence.

The biggest challenge

"The biggest challenge was that there was a deadline of January 29," Folkard recalls. "That was their cutting of the ribbon and opening day when Marie Bashir was ready to open the new building. Everything had to be up and running for that day, and the following week, when around 2000 students came back to school."

In common with many CIOs within larger professional organisations, Suresh must as well deal with the reality of personal devices just as smart phones, which seem to be getting into the hands of younger and younger children.

Further down the track she envisages students interacting with the Cisco environment from within the fixed and Wi-Fi environments at school as then as via their own phones.

In addition she is working to harness student’s fondness for social networking sites to create furthermore channels for communication and the sharing of experiences.

But once again Suresh stresses the need to properly assess the benefits for the school of any new research. "We’re not simply looking to jump on the bandwagon, it has to make sense."

For Cisco, the PLC deployment illustrates perfectly the company’s approach for its burgeoning education business, according to Ken Boal, director of Cisco Australia/New Zealand’s Public Sector Business.

The networking juggernaut is as well working with the Victorian Department of Early Education and Child Development to build a wired and wireless network capable of supporting one-to-one computing, mobility, high definition video and the sharing of digital content.