Preparation and teaching methods are the keys to digital transformation in the public schools

Vallensbæk Municipality

In Vallensbæk Municipality, south of Copenhagen in Denmark, digitization and digitalization is not about IT procurement: It’s about careful planning and about culture changes. Teaching methods and clear political prioritization has paved the way for an effective lift of the schools’ use of digital tools in education.

The situation

In Denmark, municipalities are obligated to ensure that all pupils in public schools have digital access. How this task is managed by local authorities varies greatly.

The acute pressure the Corona pandemic put schools under in 2020 made digital maturity a very visible and significant factor in day-to-day education. Teachers now had to teach in very different ways from what they had been used to, before everyone got sent home. And good digital tools, as well as experience in digital teaching and learning methods have had a great impact on the quality of teaching. Local authorities, who have invested in real digital transformation in time, have truly appreciated their return on those investments.

IT Ops in the schoolbag

It’s one thing to roll out computers to a bunch of kids. How to maintain them on a day-to-day basis is a different animal altogether: The pupils bring the PCs home with them. And from home they need access to exactly the same functionality and programs they have available to them at school. This is particularly important when everyone needs to work from home for long periods of time. The challenge is handled with Office365 and the cloud-based printer software from Printix, making it possible to print from remote. Prints are then ready and waiting to be picked up at the school.

“But the PCs need to be maintained, of course. And our concern was: Eventually, the devices will start clogging up, and we will need to run diagnostics to find out why. And then what? How do we do that? To solve it, we have decided that if there are problems with a device, it can simply be reset by the pupil,” Says Johnny Schnegelsberg-Laursen, Head of IT Operations and Development at Center for IT and Digitalization in Vallensbæk Municipality.

So, no matter where you are, you can ‘do-service-yourself’. So far, there have been no issues – no users have needed to reset their device.

“Vallensbæk Municipality as an organization is based on dialogue and closeness. This means that we quickly hear about it through the grapevine, if something’s not working — from either pupils, teachers, management or parents. Basically, we would know, if something’s not working. Everyone seems happy, and the feedback we received on the roll-out itself was very positive,”

Johnny Schnegelsberg-Laursen, Head of IT Operations and Development at Center for IT and Digitalization in Vallensbæk Municipality

2,500 devices and 19 pallets of cardboard

Johnny Schnegelsberg-Laursen conferred with consultants from twoday to identify the best approach to both roll-out and on-going operations.

twoday have implemented several technology solutions throughout the municipality, and as a result have a good understanding of both the infrastructure and the internal IT competencies. Together, they decided that Autopilot and Intune would be the best tools for the roll-out.

“We’ve been using Intune for many years, but only for our mobile devices. We wanted to apply the Apple roll-out method in our Windows world, and that’s when twoday told us about Autopilot. Every school was receiving between 400 and 550 devices – the largest school, with 550 devices, we rolled out in a single day, thanks to Autopilot. And all 2,500 devices were rolled out in just three days – including the unboxing, which incidentally generated 19 pallets of cardboard!”, says Johnny Schnegelsberg-Laursen.

The roll-out itself went quickly, primarily because the IT team had prepared diligently, and had spent a lot of time on e.g. trimming the set-up.

“Of course, a lot of the things we’ve been used to being able to do via group policies and SCCM, are not possible, more difficult, or need to be done in a different way, in Intune. So, it’s been an exciting journey, but also challenging and time consuming, to achieve a result we are happy with,” says Johnny Schnegelsberg-Laursen.

twoday’s Kent Agerlund, who was advisor for Vallensbæk Municipality, describes how the requirements to the roll-out of the computers, and the fact that they would be used by pupils both at school and at home, exposed a number of the limitations of traditional PC operations:

“The pupils’ PCs aren’t tied to specific networks, and are not connected behind the organizations firewall. They are connected via the internet, and must therefore be managed through the internet. With Microsoft Intune – or Microsoft Endpoint Manager, as it has been renamed – Vallensbæk achieves precisely the flexibility they need in their administration of the machines, without compromising on data security, or the pupils’ user experience on the individual devices,” says Kent Agerlund, Principal consultant at twoday.

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Magnus Agervold

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