The school's digitalization - What do you want it to do for you?

I’m currently working on a kind of culture-building digitization sketch for the school - guidelines for how an organization can work with everything around IT - from leadership to staff and students.

Of course we have governing documents and a national digitization strategy and that’s good. But it mostly concerns learning (which is no small thing). What I still miss, however, is a bit of Minority Report–style IT, visions and goals to strive for.

What do we want IT to do for us? What problems can IT solve? Now I want your wild thoughts, ideas and wishes. Both things that are possible today and maybe not. Very concrete, because I’m a bit dumb. Ignore obstacles like GDPR and privacy and such. Brainstorm completely freely. Which tasks could you stop doing, or what could IT do better?

I’ll start (maybe not very Minority Report, but still):

• Automatic room booking for exams based on which room has the best environment at that time regarding temperature and air quality
• Automatic attendance management (face, chip, RFID or other)
• Automatic scheduling
• Automatic real-time transcription of what the teacher says in the classroom, simultaneously translated into different languages for those who need it
• Bots that live on social media and email that can answer frequently asked questions, scanning and retrieving info from different channels
• Everything wireless, from networks to projectors to printers/copiers on all devices
• Open (for everyone) centrally created video and interactive learning materials with recognized skilled teachers covering all subjects
• Open (for everyone) centrally created adaptive learning resources — in different languages
• Automatically accessible material in the form of translations and read-aloud versions of all text material, such as weekly newsletters and learning platforms
• Automatic recording/streaming and documentation of all lessons in real time, so students who are at home (or not) can follow or access afterwards, of course with translations and similar
• Automatic possibilities for analysis of — and compilation of — the data we collect in school
• Connections between absence systems and affected services, for example school meals
• Individual notifications relevant to, for example, teachers; students’ attendance, classroom working environment before an upcoming lesson (temp etc.), whether equipment in the room works before the upcoming lesson
• Digital assistants…

… ah, come on now. What do you want to stop doing that you think IT can fix? That can help a colleague, guardians or a student. Give me some tips! Write a comment here or on social media.

Many thanks for the help and inspiration!

EDIT: 15 May 19:44 - Input from readers

• Better communication channel between students, guardians and the school.
• Forms to collect a lot of information, instead of all the individual paper forms…
• Collect and analyze data. E.g. results over the years, in one place.
• An inventory system for materials at the school?
• Push notifications with e.g. time, place and materials.
• Not so much a vision, but a thought. I’ve thought about buying NFC chips and a reader for my students, so they just walk past the reader and scan. It costs a bit, so it’s just a dream, but the student scans twice: when they arrive and when they leave. All attendance management runs via an API to the web service that keeps track of attendance. In my dream world, this would help students get to lessons on time, and become one less administrative problem. In some schools students already have tags to enter the school. Then it should be possible to solve, or would it be a GDPR problem? A solution for attendance already exists and is GDPR-secure.
• This one isn’t so high tech, but I think we should really take advantage of the possibilities of distance education already in primary school. Imagine for everyone who has difficulty coping with a classroom environment (due to NPF, social phobia, physical illness) being able to just focus on schoolwork! That would solve a large part of the problem with students staying at home, for example. It could be set up just like many adult distance education programmes, I think.
• Smooth transcription of messages to homes that we dictate would save a lot of writing time. Overall, the extensive documentation requirements are an incentive for various dictation services that are good in Swedish.
• Help with analysis of data. In the school world oceans of data are already collected today (and more will likely come), but at almost all levels people are catastrophically bad at analyzing the data, identifying the root problems and then implementing relevant measures (which in turn need to be evaluated by collecting relevant data). So analysis, problem identification (the cause can be something completely different from where the symptoms show) and suggestions for relevant measures are thus my proposal.