Certainly, the most prevalent software model in schools is on-premise software, that is, software installed on individual workstations, or on servers which workstations connect to for running an application, all in-house typically, or for larger districts, across the WAN as a client-server product. The amount of this type of software available for schools can be seen by browsing through one of the many educational software catalogs, such as Software for Schools by National School Products, (www.NationalSchoolProducts.com), Educational Resources, (www.edresources.com), Sunburst, (www.Sunburst.com), and many others. This type of software installation is the most common for all types of schools, and educators have become quite comfortable with all that is involved with supporting it, even when they are aware of the costs of that support.

The next major shift in software delivery, Application Service Providers (ASP), came about in the 1990s, according to an article on Wikipedia.org, as the Internet became available to the public. In the original implementation of this model, “each customer has its own customized version of the hosted application, and runs its own instance of the application on the host’s servers.” Spencer, A. (2005). Examples of software designed under this model are early online gradebook programs like ThinkWave, (www.ThinkWave.com), which actually require a portion of the application to be installed on the local client, and the database is stored on an Internet hosted server, accessed by the client component. Some forms of ASP software may use a browser, but often the client portion of the application provides its own interface. ASP products may also be implemented purely in-house, serving its clients throughout a local or wide area network.

As for the SaaS delivery model, the underlying principal is to provide access on a fee basis, also called a subscription, across the Internet via a browser for use of a specific service or process stored on a central data center server. SaaS is a variation of the ASP delivery model, and multiple acronyms have sprung up, all referring to the same model such as, “Internet business service (IBS), business service provider (BSP), solutions service provider (SSP), and more.”, according to The Software and Information Industry Association, (www.siia.net). The catchword is “subscription”, which is a dramatic shift away from the retail and off-the-shelf products IT is familiar with. This term may elicit alarm in the minds of many conservative IT directors and school administrators, and many are now attempting to gauge the benefit of SaaS based solutions versus more traditional products. Many are no doubt already using some SaaS products without fully realizing it due to the confusing terms floating around the industry. However, an increasing number of schools are finding SaaS based solutions an economical alternative to costly and antiquated financial and logistic on-premise or client-server packages they have been chained to.

Just how widespread is the new SaaS delivery model you might ask? According to a report by Gartner, Inc., by the year 2011, 25% of new business software will be delivered as SaaS, (2006). In the education software market, many companies are moving to a SaaS based delivery method for their existing products, such as online keyboarding, grade books, assessment programs, study skills applications, student information management systems, and many others. For small to very large school districts, there are a number of compelling reasons for doing so.

“SaaS is a way to access capabilities that would otherwise be too complex or expensive to do in-house. For instance, Web application security assessments require specialized skills, and the cost of a full-time employee or outside consultants can be prohibitive. A service based assessment is a lower-cost alternative.” (Conry-Murray, 2007)

The number of companies producing SaaS based solutions is sparking a revolution in how IT gets done in education, and how educators are developing engaging learning opportunities for their students.

Schools that have staff members with programming and Web site development backgrounds also have embraced this delivery model. For example, as the computer teacher for a private school district covering seven states, I recently chose to develop a Web based solution that would allow IT Directors and computer teachers from all schools in the district to create individual IT profiles for their school, which can be searched and viewed online from a central Web site. This product qualifies as SaaS, and will provide some customizability for each individual user who accesses the product. See Appendix A below for details on the product. The benefits of producing this product using the SaaS model reduces maintenance labor, makes it available 24×7x365, uses less resources, and greatly decreased deployment time. A user accessing the application performs no installation routine on local hardware and is not required to perform any configuration for it to be operational. Additionally, users and IT staff alike, have no maintenance or upgrade issues to be concerned with. This simple application demonstrates just how wide-spread the appeal is for SaaS modeled solutions. They are inherently designed to improve efficiency in any organization’s business processes.

The example above merely hints at how SaaS is beginning to transform how businesses and schools can benefit from the model. As for schools specifically, teachers are beginning to sign up for online grade book sites for recording grades, like www.ThinkWave.com, by ThinkWave, Inc. of Sebastopol, California. As a complete online grade book tool, ThinkWave grade book data is managed and backed up by the company, reducing IT staff workload. Data can be exported into several formats for further use by schools if necessary. From the IT perspective, there are few installation concerns and almost zero maintenance issues. In my case, it also reduced the amount of professional development training time needed, as I was able to refer teachers to online help files built into the product. Initial introductory training was not needed, though I did produce a brief getting started guide with useful tips and suggestions. Implementation of the product was accomplished much sooner than normal by not having to focus so much on setup and configuration, meaning teachers were productive much earlier and were using the product immediately after signing up. Though still considered a SaaS based product, it does require a locally installed front end, which publishes to a database on a remote server. A local copy of the grade book data is stored on the client as well for redundancy. IT staff reap other benefits from this model as well. Should the grade data become corrupt in the local file and is unrecoverable, the file can be reconstructed from the online database easily by ThinkWave’s support staff. Many companies provide similar grade book products using the SaaS model, or a variation.

Many school districts are realizing similar benefits from the use of software like Pearson SuccssNet (www.pearsonsuccessnet.com), a Web application delivering online curriculum for teachers and students. Used by teachers to provide a wide range of uses in the classroom, it provides similar benefits to IT staff by reducing the amount of resources needed to support it. All data is stored online and maintained by Pearson SuccessNet. Teachers may need initial support by local IT staff in terms of getting familiar with the interface and basic usage concepts, but as in my case, this is easily done via an introductory user’s guide with plenty of step-by-step procedures and screen shots. See Appendix C for Pearson SuccessNet Users’ guide I created. Though producing a users’ guide such as that shown in Appendix C takes time to create, it certainly takes far less time than having to plan for, create training materials, and provide individual or group training sessions.

There are numerous examples of how the SaaS delivery model is allowing schools to reduce expenses and implement truly engaging teaching tools. However, SaaS is not without its drawbacks. Schools need to consider the downside to choosing solutions that rely completely on the Internet for access. If the Internet becomes unavailable, pure SaaS products become unavailable for staff and students alike. Teachers using SaaS based solutions should be prepared in this event, and have appropriate material available to continue the lesson without disruption. The consequences of not being prepared for outage could be disastrous for young learners.

Proper expectations should be given to students up front about the possibility of losing the Internet connection, and they should be made aware of alternate plans to help reduce stress. IT personnel should work with staff and solution providers both to help ensure best practices in using SaaS based solutions. Make sure you know how the company intends to provide updates, bug fixes, and security patches. Some situations may require more flexibility on the vendor’s part, especially where security is concerned due to school’s need to protect personally identifiable information of their students. No solutions should be jumped into without proper investigation on the full impact and consequences for parties concerned, especially in education.

Additionally, it is a good practice to communicate often with your school’s board and administration through periodic presentations of the status of technology initiatives. Keeping everyone informed of the status of solutions implemented and the benefits gained, goes a long way toward reducing misunderstandings on progress. Regular reviews of the school’s technology plan, and established maintenance procedures should be held at least semi-annually, to ensure proper decisions are being made that reflect established goals. Following practices such as these will help determine the best software solutions for perceived needs. When all facets of these needs have been considered, the choice between traditional versus newer solutions becomes easier to make.

References

Conry-Murray, A. (2007, October 1). Software As A Service Requires Diligence. InformationWeek, 47

On Premise Software Will Be Challenged By SaaS Software Delivery. (2006, October 3). Gartner, Inc. Retrieved May 22, 2008, from http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=496886

Software as a service. (2008, May 21). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved May 22, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Software_as_a_service&oldid=213843117

Comments welcome.

I’ve opened up Microsoft Word and want to create a target for a game I plan to play with my students later in the week.  So instead of creating my own target, I decide to see if any existing targets are available by clicking the Insert tab and then clicking the SmartArt button in the Illustrations section of the toolbar.  In the Choose a SmartArt Graphic window, I click the Relationship option on the left, because I suspect a target just might be contained in that grouping.  Sure enough, there is a target graphic available in the list of objects named Basic Target.  (See Figure 1)  After selecting the target and clicking the OK button, the graphic is inserted into my document.  If you’re following along In Word as you read, you must admit it looks kind of plain don’t you think?

Figure 1

Now, when working with objects in Microsoft Word, or most any application in fact, you must select the object before you can apply changes to the object.  In my case, I’ve inserted the Basic Target object, which is really a collection of other objects that make a single object.  In reality, they only appear to make a single object however.  We’ll talk more on this later though.  For now, make sure the entire object (target) is selected.  You should see a border around the object if it is. If not, click on the target once and you should see the border.   Now that the target is selected I want to change its color, so I click the Design tab.  In the SmartArt Styles section I click the Change Colors button which displays a scrollable list of color styles.  I choose the right most option in the “Colorful” row (second row), called “Colorful Range – Accent Colors 5 to 6,” because I really want to dazzle the students and make it more difficult for them to hit the target.

Now I’ve got a colorful target, but it still lacks depth and realism.  Notice the icons to the right of the Change Color object on the Design toolbar in the SmartArt Styles section.  If you hover the mouse cursor over the current selected icon, you’ll see it says “Simple Fill”.  Move to the right though, and click the last button labeled “Intense Effect”.  Our target now has some depth.  Now let’s see what else we can do.  Immediately to the right of the “Intense Effect” button is a small down arrow button with a line above it, the “More” button.  When I click the “More” button, I get 3 rows of effect options I can apply to my target.  That’s a lot of modifying we can do.  Shiny is good, so I clicked the “Polished” effect button to apply the effect.  I’m starting to like the way my target looks now.

Final modifications to my target graphic will be to remove the text boxes and lines that point to the rings.  Why?  I don’t really need them, I just need a target.  Well, to remove the text boxes and lines, we’ve got to work with individual objects that form a part of the SmartArt graphic.  You’ve likely been wondering, why I’ve left them there all this time.  Actually, it was just convenient to leave them there up to this point, but now we must deal with them.  Removing the lines is not difficult really.  The trick is placing the cursor over the line until the cursor becomes a four headed arrow with the pointer, which indicates you can click to select or drag to Move.  So I click the line with the left mouse button to select it.  You can tell an object is selected when you can see the size handles for the object, that is, either small white circles (corners) or small black/white squares (sides).  On a line object, there are only two size handles, one at each end.  Most objects will have eight size handles, one in each corner and one in the middle of each side.  Once the object is selected, I press the Delete key on the keyboard to remove it.  After doing that for each line, only the text boxes are left.

Text boxes are a bit trickier to delete.  Because they can accept text and are editable, if you click a text box where the default text is, the text box will switch into “edit” mode.  The text box is selected, but only in the sense that it’s showing you the size handles in the event you wish to resize the box to accommodate text.  But if you press the Delete key on your keyboard, the text box remains, because it’s in edit mode, therefore pressing the Delete key would delete text to the right of the Insertion Point (the flashing vertical bar in the text box).  While the Insertion Point is flashing in the text box, I place the mouse cursor over the border of the text box and left-click once.  The text box is now truly selected as an object and pressing the Delete key removes it.  After removing the other two text boxes, I only need to resize my target to make it larger and then print it off on my color printer and tape it to the white board for the game.

By all means, take some time to work with SmartArt.  The more you work with graphics images, the better you become at modifying them.  Remember, that each SmartArt image is composed of multiple objects, each of which can be deleted or modified independently to help you create a graphic organizer that meets your needs.

The natural solution for me back then was simply to save my uniquely created graphics images in a special presentation file I called Graphics, which acted as a library of images I could quickly insert into my presentations. While that is still a good idea, and may serve you well when creating your own images, I’d like to point out that, for those of you using Office 2007 applications, a handy pre-built library of many organizational graphics images are available to choose from, making it very easy to quickly put together a useful slide. This is great news for educators with very little time. It can mean creating a great looking handout for a lesson and getting 25 copies ran off in less than a couple of minutes.

In Office 2007 feature containing this collection of graphic images is called SmartArt. To view the library of SmartArt graphics organizers available, click the Insert tab and click the SmartArt button in the Illustrations section. In the left pane of the Choose a SmartArt Graphic dialog window, you can choose a category of the type of organizer you’re looking for, or choose to view “All” items. Hovering the mouse cursor over an item in the List pane displays the name of the item in bubble help. Clicking or selecting an item in the List pane displays a larger and colored preview of the item in the right pane, along with its primary function and suggestions on how to use it. When you find the organizer you like or that best meets your needs, click the OK button to insert it into your document, slide, or spreadsheet. Fire up Word and take a look at these right now. You may be amazed at how many there are to choose from.

What do you do if you can’t find a SmartArt graphic organizer that meets your need? I’ll discuss that in the next article, “Modifying a SmartArt Graphic”. Earlier versions of Microsoft Office, at least back to Office XP, and maybe 2000, had a similar feature called Diagrams, and it’s accessible from the Drawing toolbar which usually displays along the bottom of the application window.

Although this article explains using a feature of Microsoft Office 2007 applications, other productivity applications may have a similar feature, so be sure to look for it. If you don’t see it right off, try using Help (press the F1 key) and search by entering keywords like organizer, shapes, symbols, diagrams, or flow charts. So… if you are using Office 2000 or above, take advantage of the tools you already have at hand to make life easier for yourself. Get started creating your own handouts without having to use scissors, glue, or tape. Experiment all you want because you can always choose Undo (from the Edit menu, or Ctrl+Z key combination) if you make a mistake.

Richard Thomason
Madison Campus Elementary
“Tools for Education”