IT Support for Primary Schools

What are the common challenges that teachers experience with technology in the classroom?

How do we prepare students for those roles?

In a number of ways!

One is that we teach students a wide range of transferable skills. Another way is to ensure that their education utilises technology and software within the different aspects of their school subjects to prepare students for a world that does not yet exist. Schools that are confident with utilising equipment and technology have a heightened competitive advantage against schools that avoid it. By including the innovative tools available, good IT infrastructure and working collaboratively alongside traditional teaching methods, schools and students are able to perform better and the curriculum can be delivered more effectively. Students are likely to be more engaged when able to use YouTube, interactive programs or recording their presentations at school as lessons are delivered with a better context in regards to the outside digital world.

For many schools, it's about understanding how they can follow the curriculum or teach a broad spectrum of curriculum (for schools with academy status who do not follow the National Curriculum) while including a comprehensive range of technology. Why not let students take part in a science lesson by learning about volcanos through filming a simulated explosion and sharing it with their classmates? Zenzero can help your primary school if you're not sure how to get started on facilitating technology for students.

 Tools for teachers and leadership teams

Planning and collaborating within your primary school

While adding more technology to lessons can increase engagement and therefore improve student outcomes, it can also create huge benefits for the leadership team and staff. In the image above you can see that St. Edmunds Primary School are using Microsoft Planner to store their annual initiatives and events. By using Planner, everyone with access can see live as more information is added in which means that they benefit from an accurate snapshot of what is being planned. It helps the team collaborate on joint initiatives and have visibility for any upcoming focus the school has. Teachers can also see benefits in using it for lesson planning when working with their TA or subject specialists by being able to add in notes, attachments, text and deadlines or dates.

By sharing data effectively and providing wider visibility through the advantages of technology - teams, departments and other teachers can offer guidance or previously used material that may improve and speed up tasks that take place in school. These tools can help improve communication across the school, making teachers' lives easier to manage and providing better work/life balance while increasing a primary's school effectiveness.

Working from anywhere

The current reality is that teachers' workdays are long. When school finishes and students leave to head home, there is still lesson planning, marking, parents evenings and reports to work through and prepare. While for the most part teaching will take place in the classroom, the remaining workload that teachers have should be able to be conducted from wherever your teachers are comfortable rather than having to be on-site at school.

Hiring and retaining great teachers through flexible working

As other professions enjoy the benefits of working from home, schools can ensure their technology and IT systems are able to be accessed from anywhere to support the autonomy of your staff. With better systems in place, your school is able to promote your flexible working practices to new staff who want to join your school and retain your existing staff.

Zenzero will help to make your school 'flexible working' ready

Having cloud-based systems is central to making flexible working possible. Zenzero can update your IT systems while ensuring that the right security is in place for a smooth 'work from anywhere' approach to make sure that any sensitive data remains secure. We will manage the hard work of getting systems ready so that for staff everything is easily accessible through a connected and simple login. Our support services including our helpdesk are available to your staff Monday to Friday for any technical issues that your staff experience. This removes the need for your staff to call and email the person responsible for IT at your school or be prevented from doing what they need to, ensuring no loss in productivity.

Achieving your school's sustainability goals

By adopting a cloud-first solution and software, it is more carbon efficient than traditional data centres or a single server (which is what most primary education currently have). This can help your school achieve its sustainability goals, and Zenzero can manage the reporting for you to provide to your education leadership team.

Navigating cyber security & GDPR in your primary school

Cyber security and managing GDPR compliant data can feel quite daunting to primary education, while also knowing its something that needs to be managed effectively. By using a business like Zenzero that have experience and knowledge across both, you can offload the hard work in getting up to speed and making sure that the technology at your school is both safe and compliant as Zenzero will only implement IT systems that are.