With the DigitalPakt Schule (Digital Pact for Schools), the federal government has created an instrument that promotes the equipping of schools with digital infrastructure.
Our kids deserve the best education, and digitalization is a key building block.
This depends on the following components:
eduGEN combines years of experience in the fields of school operations, planning, implementation, and the operation of technical infrastructures. This represents a unique level of expertise in Germany for the successful development of the digital school.
When implementing digitalization concepts for schools, current funding offers a great opportunity to establish perfect technical equipment in schools without being "overrun" by follow-up costs after the funding budgets expire and overloading the school authority's budget with high license and service fees.
One does not have to come at the expense of the other!
Investments are currently 100% subsidized, and the operating costs for the first two years can be covered here.
But what happens to the follow-up costs from the third year onwards? They become a burden on the budget of the municipality or the private school authority. For this reason, it is enormously important that the systems used have high availability and are easy to operate—this is the only way to ensure sustainable benefits for digital teaching.
Investments must be made intelligently with a focus on low follow-up costs!
It is precisely this focus that motivated Compart to develop a technical concept for an optimal IT landscape for a municipal school environment—from primary school to high school.
To this end, we have founded a specialized IT company [eduGEN GmbH: www.diedigitaleSchule.de] together with a highly experienced private school operator—true to the primacy of pedagogy.
With the DigitalPakt Schule (Digital Pact for Schools), the federal government has created an instrument that promotes the equipping of schools with digital infrastructure.
Our kids deserve the best education, and digitalization is a key building block.
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For effective support, it is important that the system landscape is implemented consistently. This means the municipal or district service department does not need to develop an excessive number of, and above all, expensive qualifications for its service technicians.
If service technician A is unavailable, service technician B, who is trained on different systems, is often unable to provide perfect support.
Standards also offer advantages when procuring devices and licenses. They simplify the procurement process, and by focusing on a single manufacturer, you have the option to optimize follow-up costs through economies of scale.
To reduce operating costs, it is advisable to operate many technical systems centrally.
With today's technologies, it makes no sense at all to equip every school with, for example, servers and storage systems. If the functions of compute, storage, virtualization, and data protection are located at a central site, these systems can also be managed centrally—without having to drive from school to school—in an effort-optimized manner.
In addition, schools can share these technical resources, meaning necessary reserve capacities only need to be created once rather than repeatedly.
Central systems often offer advantages in many areas of licensing, particularly for management platforms for all kinds of systems, such as firewalls, WLANs, and many more. This applies to almost all systems that do not—like a smartboard, if a school and its authority have decided on one—need to be located decentrally in a classroom.
IT hubs include data centers, computing centers, or even external clouds.
Centralization makes IT systems more available, cost-optimized, and manageable—especially in times of skilled labor shortages.
Of course, centralization always requires a strong network connection between school locations and the central hub (municipal school data center). Fiber-optic connections and directional radio networks are ideal for this. Often, schools are connected to the municipal school data center via two parallel paths, so that if one network fails, the affected school doesn't even "notice."
To reduce operating costs, it is advisable to operate many technical systems centrally.
With today's technologies, it makes no sense at all to equip every school with, for example, servers and storage systems. If
the functions of compute, storage, virtualization, and data protection at a central location, these systems can also be
...
Modern technical IT systems can now handle a great deal automatically—this drastically reduces the effort required from specialized personnel and saves the municipality follow-up costs! Incidentally, this also eliminates the sources of error that can repeatedly occur due to human intervention.
Use modern technologies like HCI (Hyper-Converged Infrastructure) instead of the monolithic IT architectures (server, storage, virtualization) of the past and, unfortunately, often the present as well.
We are HCI experts with numerous successfully implemented solutions on the market!
With HCI, you are able to operate highly efficient edge computing in schools—should you be unable or unwilling to implement a high standard of centralization.
The current situation presents enormous challenges and opportunities for school authorities. To create and operate an IT landscape that is optimized both technically and economically—especially regarding follow-up costs—the goals of standardization, centralization, and automation must be pursued. This requires that the often highly varied media concepts of individual schools within a municipality be maximally aligned with these goals during the finalization process of the municipal media development plan.
Here, too, our team of highly experienced experts can support school authorities, using our know-how to bring clarity to the conceptualization and selection of technical systems.
