Faculty News

ICT Department

What a year 2020 has been.  When I sat down to plan out projects and initiatives for 2020 in the latter part of 2019, I had no idea that my plans would be turned upside down, let alone what 2020 would mean for education and our lives.  With that being said, and without getting political on the ever-evolving Victorian restrictions, I’d like to touch on some of the achievements of the ICT Department, and what is coming up for us.

We have just completed a refresh of our core server room infrastructure which includes all our servers, with redundancy split across two server rooms, new backup technologies, and the introduction of cloud-based backups for a further layer of protection of the college's data.  We have also introduced extra protection against ransomware attacks and increased the backup intervals on many of our systems.

We have written software to check-in students who have completed a temperature check each morning, so the temperature check is recorded against the students roll, which then enables teachers to see which students have completed their temperature check when marking the roll.

We are also in the process of completing a security audit, which has been auditing the college's network from an external perspective, measuring our systems against cyber-attack, and giving us further insight to more improvements to protect our network and your son’s data.  Later this month this will flow onto some wireless penetration testing to audit our wireless network security.

We are also in the middle of an aircon upgrade project in one of our server rooms, which has involved craning new equipment onto the roof, new ductwork in and through the core server room for more efficient airflow, and better protection of the equipment in this room.  This is due to be completed in the coming weeks.

We are getting ready for the end of the year with multiple projects underway. We are upgrading our internet (doubling the bandwidth) and moving across to a new carrier.  We are preparing for our yearly refresh of devices for the Student Personal Computer Programme (SPCP), which includes over 500 new devices, as well as taking back the old 500 devices from students finishing Year 9 and Year 12, and preparing these for sale back to these families or onto computer recyclers. We are also deploying two new exciting classrooms in the VCD and CDM spaces, including a green room for video and audio recordings, and high-end printing with large format roll printing, 3D & CO2 laser printers.

I’d also like to congratulate the ICT Team on their amazing efforts this year, in what has been unprecedented times, they have rolled with the punches and done a fantastic job in supporting students, parents and staff as everyone goes through massive learning curves.  Well done team!

Mr Ashley Voigt

ICT Manager