Faculty News - ICT Department

These last six months have been somewhere between a blur, a rollercoaster ride, a whirlwind and like watching paint dry, and possibly all of these at different times.  Thankfully Mazenod College has had some dedicated IT Professionals helping the staff and students through these tumultuous times (technically speaking).  Mr Callum Branagan has been a valuable asset to the College, joining the ICT Team in April 2021, being on-site through the lockdowns to help keep student and staff devices operational among other tasks and projects. While the rest of the ICT Team Mr Stuart Rhind, 

Mr Daniel Gigliotti, Mr Tim Beard and Ms Merline Carmelus have been working hard supporting and maintaining systems mixed in with project work, some on a roster to come into the College to keep things running on-site, others working hard from home, also trying to manage the balance of home learning with their children, and working remotely until all hours of the night.  Even though IT Professionals Day doesn’t seem to be celebrated in Australia, it should be (I’m not sure it will catch on), so please join me in thanking them when you get the chance!   https://nationaltoday.com/national-professionals-day/

The team has been busily working on a number of projects aside from the day-to-day ICT operations and support at the College.  We have explored our options for our security footprint both for endpoint protection and for network protection looking at many different solutions, settling on a new deployment of updated endpoint software with added protection and features, and new firewall hardware to be implemented at the end of the current school year. 

We have also deployed a new helpdesk system which will hopefully help to improve communication around the progress of support issues, as well as give us opportunities to create efficiencies in the team, the way we operate, track progress, document, and create automation where possible.

Another goal for the team is to improve the way we can deploy software and manage our fleet of devices, utilising modern deployment software and methodologies.  We have been working with a partner to help us deploy Microsoft Endpoint Manager and Intune which is an integrated solution for managing all of our devices from the Microsoft cloud.  This will be a staged process, as we roll out these features in the coming months and next year or two.

The ICT Team continues to test and have set up trials for Office 365 including Microsoft Teams for faculty use, as well as train our Digital Coaches on the use of this technology.  We have also been busy planning the deployment of the new students’ devices for Year 7 2022, and Year 10 2022, which is over 500 devices, as well as planning to process the over 500 device returns that is part of the end of year rollover.  All of which to say it’s been a very busy 6 months.

Mr Ashley Voigt

ICT Manager