PRINT.IT
25
EDUCATION
Every day, teachers have to
maintain an on-going balance:
how do they ensure that they
focus the majority of their time
on their students, whilst dealing
with increased pressures due to
changing curriculums and external
assessments?
Add to this the additional
pressures caused by five years of
budget cuts administered by local
authorities. The chancellor’s 2015
spending review suggests this won’t
change any time soon, with school
and college IT departments under
increased pressure to make sure
costs are kept low, while trying to
adapt to an increasingly digital and
connected world.
Technology has a key role to
play in achieving this. Document
management, with the right
technology and support behind it,
can play a central role in helping
schools to do what they do best:
teach!
Smarter printing
The education sector has fairly
specific needs. Printing continues to
be integral to interactive teaching,
with hundreds of worksheets and
learning aids needing to be printed
each year. This adds up. In research
we commissioned this year, over
half (56%) of teachers stated that
more than 3,000 sheets of paper are
printed in an average term. That’s a
hefty amount of printing to manage
across devices.
Schools need to work smarter,
and better document management
practices could help to revolutionise
teachers’ planning and student
management.
Take the cloud, for example.
New techniques, such as cloud
printing, allow students and teachers
to easily view and download
documents wherever they are or
send them to where they’re going
to be. Have a lesson on the other
side of the college campus but don’t
fancy carrying 100 sheets up and
down corridors? With cloud printing,
teachers can easily send it to the
closest device to their next lesson.
Another key benefit is cloud
printing’s reliability. Even if
something goes wrong with a
school’s own servers, all the files,
documents and data stored on
the cloud print systems are safe
and able to be accessed. No more
losing scores of documents if the IT
infrastructure fails.
But what if the school already
uses cloud storage? Your multi-
function printer can be linked up with
Google Drive, OneDown, Dropbox and
Evernote so staff can access a range
of documents straight from their
devices.
Mobile is another area that offers
an improvement on the status quo.
Mobile printing allows staff to
print on the go – if they’re at home
or away from their computer, at the
click of the button they can send
documents to the printer, allowing
them to focus on other tasks.
Enhanced security
IT managers often cite security
risks as the primary reason schools
don’t migrate to the cloud. With
cloud printing, however, printing
can actually become more secure.
Nigel Allen, marketing director at KYOCERA Document Solutions UK, explains
how teachers can be more efficient in an era of budget cuts
Save and prosper
By using private cloud, you can
ensure nobody else has access to
your documents and all traffic is
encrypted.
You can also restrict device
access to relevant users and
departments, enabling the IT
department to control access and
usage more easily. Don’t want
students printing out reams on the
expensive A3 colour printer? No
problem – just restrict their use on
that device or alter their settings so
they aren’t able to print in colour.
Using this simple programming
setting could save the school
hundreds of pounds every year.
Automatic marking
Software solutions can also ease
the headache of lesson planning
and improve productivity. There
are apps available that can help
teachers to mark and analyse tests
automatically. Why spend hours
marking when you can automate
your printer to do it for you? Again, a
simple piece of software, but once
installed, teachers suddenly have
more valuable time to plan their next
lesson.
Document management can also
help when it comes to managing
student records. The chances are
you’re already among the more than
22,000 schools across 150 UK local
authorities that use the SIMS school
information management system.
Hard copy student records can be
difficult to keep track of, but with
a multifunctional device, you can
scan them directly into the SIMS.net
database for centralised storage and
simple retrieval.
All in all, there’s now a range
of software tools available to help
schools, colleges and universities
to save money and time – across
departments and not just in the
classroom.
All of them will make workflows
that little bit quicker and easier,
leading to increased organisational
productivity and efficiency. In this era
of budget cuts, making the most of
the time and money at your disposal
has never been more important.
kyoceradocumentsolutions.co.uk
Nigel Allen,
marketing director,
KYOCERA
Document
Solutions UK
