Introduction

This book is aimed at businesses, and contains lots of examples of a business or an individual employee doing a small thing that has made a big difference to customer or client. I don’t want to say too much about the book here, because I’ve written a review of it for another website. (If they publish it, I’ll link to it from here; if not, I’ll publish it myself.) However, I will say that reading the book made me reflect on the “tiny noticeable things” that a head of Computing or EdTech leader in a school, local authority, academy trust or school district might do. The following list contains examples of things I did in school that made life much easier for those on the receiving end. What might you do?

TNTs I did as a teacher and head of edtech

• Set homework at the start of the lesson rather than at the end, so that students would have time to note it down and clarify any issues they might have.

• Learnt the students’ names as quickly as possible, so that I could greet them by name as they entered my lesson.

• Set up the new school intake on the network before the start of the school year. While there were always some who needed to deleted, and others added, the majority of kids were all set up before they’d even set foot in the place.

• Used a spreadsheet to assign user IDs and passwords to students, and mail-merge to print them onto to sticky labels. Total time to give out log-in credentials: around 10 minutes tops. A deputy head, by contrast, took a whole lesson to achieve the same goal, by reading out each student’s details and getting them to write them down.

• Created spare user IDs for students in case they couldn’t remember their log-in details. It meant they could get on with some work straight away, and I didn’t have to waste lesson time sorting them out. It did involve me in a certain degree of transferring work to their own user area afterwards, but I felt that was a better option than disrupting my lesson.

• Created guest user IDs so that any visitor to the school could make use of the facilities if they needed to. For example, a supply teacher who was only in school for one day might wish to type up and print a worksheet.

• Created “5 minute guides” showing how to do something like create a document or a spreadsheet, save it and print it, based on the principle that anyone should be able to walk into a computer lab or open a school laptop and be able to achieve something useful within five minutes. I humbly refer to this as Freedman’s 5 minute rule!

• Amalgamated the room timetables of 4 computer labs onto one sheet of paper, which I put on the staffroom noticeboard. Before I did that, any teacher wishing to book a lesson in a computer room had to go into each room to consult that room’s timetable.

• Asked the school office staff to give teachers the keys to the computer rooms. Before that they had to get them from a deputy headteacher’s office — which was often locked.

• Provided tea, coffee and cakes or biscuits for staff attending my meetings.

• Tried to make my departmental meetings interesting, such as by inviting guest speakers.