August 31, 2009

By Mike Stone

Cisco® Unified Communications has helped transform St. Saviour's School in Lagos, Nigeria, from an institution with basic telephone connections into a high-tech cyber-school.

The 320 or so students at the independent primary school, dedicated to teaching the U.K. national curriculum, now enjoy fully-networked classrooms with computers, interactive whiteboards and IP phones, and are looking forward to the promise of distance learning.

St. Saviour's consists of a number of isolated buildings and until its high-tech makeover teachers had to send students on foot in order to deliver messages, as only one of the seven buildings on the school campus had telephone service.

Feelings of isolation amongst pupils and teachers, plus real concerns about the ability of the school to respond to medical or other emergencies, prompted the management to consider an upgrade.

Faced with a requirement to teach information and communications technology (ICT) skills from the U.K. curriculum, St. Saviour's also had a strong case for solving the lack of both voice and data links with an integrated network.

The upgrade has made St. Saviour's the first school in Nigeria to adopt IP telephony, opening the door for developments such as video conferencing. It now has technology including:

• Unified Communications, which brings together all voice and data communications on a single network.
• IP Phones to deliver voice communication to every classroom, greatly enhancing the school's ability to communicate internally and respond to emergencies.
• Wireless access which allows students and staff to extend learning and sharing beyond the classroom.

St. Saviour's ICT director, Geraldine Donnellan, says: "Our vision was to make the presence of computers pervasive in the school in order to enhance the learning experience."

She selected Cisco technology on the basis of the company's reputation and leadership in voice over IP, and chose the Nigerian IT supplier Bi-Trax Axxent to carry out the installation work.

Donnellan says: "The Cisco solution not only helped us provide a better learning experience for students; we are taking learning and teaching to the next level and preparing our students for life."

For the first time, teachers and students can access educational resources located anywhere on campus, including all peripheral devices, such as printers.

"The ability to access high-end color printers from any classroom means that students can see the output of their work in color, which fills them with pride," says Donnellan. "At the same time, printer sharing means that we can use expensive resources more cost-effectively."

This flexibility does not stop at the school gates. Since children's ability to access work away from the classroom is now part of the U.K. curriculum requirement, portability has become more important.

A new portable computer technology lab addresses this issue, with laptops allowing pupils to take their newly-acquired computing power out of the classroom.

The increased communication between staff and children within St. Saviour's makes for a much healthier atmosphere, according to Donnellan.

"Children are very sensitive and they pick up, and often mirror, what they see around them. The stronger friendships and enthusiastic teamwork of the staff influences how children relate to the world," she says.

"Our pupils have embraced the technology enthusiastically and with ease. The staff is elated by the wealth of learning that digital access has brought into the classroom and how it has extended the learning experience beyond the classroom.

"Now that we have the foundation, everyone is excited about moving forward. These are just some of the things that the school would not have imagined having when we started out a mere two years ago. It is a tremendous and very gratifying achievement."

St Saviour's move to Unified Communications reflects a growing trend of technology adoption by educational establishments worldwide.

In the United States, for example, school officials increasingly recognize the importance of converging their physical security tools on their networks and are doing so at an unprecedented pace.

Schools there are also finding that Unified Communications can help improve parent-school communication, which leads to higher academic achievement and safer students. Institutions in Melbourne, Australia, meanwhile, have been using Unified Communications since 2006.

In addition, Cisco has headed one of five private sector consortia involved in a major project to see how ICT generally might be able to help improve primary and secondary education in Africa.

Called e-Schools, the project has aimed to give all 600,000-plus schools in Africa access to ICT-based education within the next decade. It has involved other major companies including HP, Microsoft, Oracle and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

E-Schools has been overseen by the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), an economic development program run by the African Union, a federation of 53 states which covers the whole continent except for Morocco.

The project has been designed to try out different approaches to ICT in education, with a view to selecting those that are most effective and rolling them out more widely.

Mike Stone is a freelance journalist located in Barcelona, Spain.