How IT is my valley

Woodstock School in Mussoorie is fast becoming one of the most tech-savvy high schools in India.

As you climb the 2,000 meters above sea level to get to Mussoorie, the road gets progressively narrower and more twisty.

It's a relief to get away from the smog and dust of the plains, but as the scenery becomes wilder and as your car drives straight into the centre of a cloud, you begin to think that you must be lost "" you cannot possibly be going to one of the most well-connected and technologically forward high schools in India.

But you are. Woodstock School, perched high on a hilltop in Mussoorie, has IT facilities now to outstrip most national colleges.

Students email in their word-processed papers (which have been researched on the Internet); they use sophisticated media software to design and print their yearbook; they create and conduct presentations with PowerPoint, a tool that most adults would be hard-pressed to use efficiently; they even do their physics homework on a programme that allows them to visualise grotty mechanics problems.

The teachers are not spared either; the management has even introduced software called BlackBaud, which allows for easy scheduling of classes and exams, and also processes grades.

"We've got 470 students," says Jeffrey Thomas, resources librarian, "and we want to schedule exams so that no student has more than two exams on any given day. With so many students taking so many different electives, from languages to science to music, this is a classic computer problem which would be almost impossible to solve without BlackBaud."

"We've been building up IT since 1996," says David Jeffries, principal. "We use computers for everything, from internal communications to administration to actual teaching. Our vision is to make Woodstock part of a global network "" and communication is a very important aspect of this. For the last three years, we've spent Rs 1 crore annually on our technological upgrade. Right now we've got one computer between three students, and we're into a computer replacement cycle of four years, which we want to reduce to three."

This kind of upgrade put a lot of strain on Woodstock's existing network, which comprised eight servers a year and a half ago; "Servers which were actually workstations with servers on them," says Jeff Rollins, vice-head of IT.

"It was a job by itself to just back up all our information. I would start the process on Monday night, and on Tuesday morning I'd come in to find it still going. This would slow everything up in the school, and it took a lot out of the IT department in terms of labour hours."

In light of their expansion plans, Woodstock needed to come up with a way of vastly increasing their capabilities and storage. For this, they turned to EMC, the world's largest data management and storage company, who obliged with an EMC/Dell Storage Area Network in 2004.

With 1 TB (1,000 GB) of capacity, the SAN is connected to a robotic tape library so that "Whereas before, backing everything up used to take 12-15 hours, now it takes five. And I don't even have to be in the lab, I can control the whole process remotely, sitting in my house or in my office," says Rollins.

Apart from this, the investment has also freed up a lot of space on existing servers so that activities like sending and receiving email become faster.

And email is obviously very important here, not just because of Woodstock's remote location, which makes it the most efficient method of communication between students and their parents, many of whom are abroad, but also because most internal communication and administrative work is done by email also.

The moving force behind much of the IT expansion has been Steve Ediger, manager for IT at Woodstock. Ediger has been at Woodstock for nine years, and has seen it go from 100 computers and two servers across 300 users to 600 computers and 17 servers across over 600 people (470 students and 140 staff members).

What is even more astonishing is that, in order to make all this possible and to secure an efficient intranet, around 12 kilometers of fibre optic cable has been laid all across the mountainside, connecting school buildings to staff houses, student residence halls and administrative offices.

As Ediger says, "The objective has been to move IT away from just technology for the sake of technology, to an enabling tool. A major part of education is about sharing information, and that is one area in which information technology can make a huge difference."

The financial investment in this has been vast: Rs 50 lakh on the servers, the SAN and the tape; Rs 10 lakh for additional EMC hardware; Rs 12 lakh for new software; and the 12 km of fibre optic cable came at Rs 10 lakh. "Most schools wouldn't be able to afford it," says Rollins reasonably, "but it's the price you pay for a good education!"

This is borne out by the enthusiastic physics teacher, Stephen Andersen. "I was shocked when I first came here from New Zealand "" the school here was more high tech than the one I had left there! Of course, they've caught up now, but that first impression was very telling."

The library too has been vastly improved, from a new computer lab of 30 computers, where whole classes can be held, to a virtual library full of e-journals that the students can refer to while writing papers.

"We want," says Jeffries, summing up, "a school where kids can think for themselves. Teachers are here to be facilitators to learning, we want the kids to come to their own conclusions. And while IT cannot obviously accomplish this on its own, it gives the kids access to information, and a medium in which they can work out and express their thoughts."