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THE CHALLENGE
CANON'S SOLUTION
PROGRESSING NICELY
WORLD CLASS
THE FUTURE
"[Staff] are just intrigued that someone can fill out a form, place it into what they perceive to be 'just a photocopier 'and minutes later it's in their file on the intranet."
Wayne Craig, Principal, Box Hill Senior Secondary College
Box Hill Senior Secondary College is a dynamic, vibrant and welcoming school in the heart of Melbourne's eastern suburbs.
Around 650 students attend the school with 80 students in a three-year program commencing at Year 10. Students come from all parts of Melbourne, in addition a number have moved
from interstate to attend classes there.
In 2003, the College, which has the mission statement - Learning to Make a Life, Learning to Make a Living and Learning to Make a Difference - enrolled 350 new students after receiving over 700 inquiries.
THE CHALLENGE
As a technologically advanced educational facility, Box Hill Senior Secondary College has been using a variety of tools,
including a campus-wide intranet, to assist students, teachers and parents to stay up to date with the latest news and information relating to the school.
After working with its intranet technology for a number of years,Box Hill's Principal,Wayne Craig, decided that the school needed a way to scan material into a digital format - including forms - that could then be used in a timely manner by intranet-connected staff and students alike.
"We enrol 350 pupils every year and there's three months work for someone just to input the five or six pages of enrolment information each enrolment generates,"said Mr Craig."It's just not practical to stick a computer in front of
most parents and tell them to enter the data electronically,which is why the process has remained paper based, despite the data entry headache it causes."
Mr Craig could see that using a software solution to extract data of this nature -in addition to the other intranet activities it could enhance - was desirable technology for the school to acquire..In practice, the new system processes
all 350 enrolments in just over an hour,compared to the three months it was taking previously.
CANON'S SOLUTION
Canon took a solution to Box Hill Senior Secondary College comprising the imageRUNNER iR5000i multifunction
device and TELEform Elite software.
TELEform collects information from existing forms and features high-speed verification of data.It is a powerful forms
processing package ideal for departmental form processing applications - not dissimilar to one of the key roles
proposed within Box Hill.
The imageRUNNER iR5000i,meanwhile is a new breed of office equipment which functions as the central
communications hub for managing,printing,scanning and sharing information in a networked environment.It ships standard with print, copy and a multitude of electronic document send functions.
Box Hill evaluated this solution against a similar solution from a competitor, before deciding on the Canon solution.
PROGRESSING NICELY
In practice,TELEform is used for a variety of roles,as Mr Craig explains:
"We like to survey our student 's opinions of their teachers a couple of times a year for progress reports.We can now scan these forms using the Canon solution, which generates results that automatically go to the student's file and are copied to me as well."
The advantage of this process is that when the school conducts student reviews, these opinions can be used as part of their personal review program.
"We're also asking students to tell us how well they expect to go in each subject, how much homework they expect to do, how they rate themselves on motivation and commitment," said Mr Craig."Using the Canon solution,we can now
collate this information easily,rather than waiting for computers to be free,or employing people to conduct data entry."
WORLD CLASS
If news of students rating their teachers and their own academic performance comes as a surprise,Mr Craig explains that the process is happening to some extent in schools today,and it will become more common in the years ahead.
"It 's really about developing a culture of performance in schools,"said Mr Craig."It also broadens how teachers can
evaluate their own performance.Research from the UK reveals that a significant driver of educational success is a
measure of the amount of responsibility given to students - and this is a key element of that.."
The Victorian Department of Education also recently employed The Boston Consulting Group to evaluate this kind of student opinion/self-assessment enabled by the Canon solution,which returned the result that it was 'world class.'
THE FUTURE
Staff at Box Hill Senior Secondary College have adapted quickly to using the Canon Solution - and the kind of reports
it has enabled.
"Staff can certainly see the advantages,"said Mr Craig."Most are just intrigued that someone can fill out a form,place
it into what they perceive to be 'just a photocopier 'and minutes later it's in their file on the intranet."
Mr Craig doesn 't believe that Box Hill has scratched the surface of finding uses for its Canon solution yet,commenting that at least once a week,someone will realise a new use for the software and hardware.
"It's only limited by our imagination," said Mr Craig."The intranet is in place and doing what we want it to do... now
the future is up to us."
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