Supporting school IT teams has become more important than ever with technology's growing influence on today’s classrooms. And with this growing influence, IT teams in educational facilities are increasingly overwhelmed by new challenges arising.
Luckily, an intuitive, affordable solution is within every school institution's reach. By leveraging software for IT support or complaint management, IT teams can handle and resolve IT requests in an organized and efficient way.
K-12 IT Challenges and Best IT Support Desk Solutions
1. Making the Most of the IT Team
Challenge: Being short-staffed in the IT department
Solution: Leverage a software vendor to get a better return on your resource expenditure.
Some schools lack in-house IT teams, increasing the demand for intuitive tools and vendor support. As our dependency on classroom technology grows, it only makes sense to have a software solution in place to handle the influx of technology requests and issues.
Software maximizes the abilities of an IT team with the ability to triage help tickets so that urgent issues are resolved with priority, while less critical issues are addressed in an appropriate, timely manner.
Moreover, software helps IT teams spot and respond to redundancies, duplicates, and repeatable issues. They can proactively address issues from happening again, instate processes to curb common issues, or set up workflows to ensure issues get the attention they need.
Simplify your IT team's process without breaking budget.
2. Prioritizing Requests in a Timely Manner
Challenge: Streamlining a way to gather requests and complaints
Solution: Webforms offer a uniform collection method to organize requests.
Webforms are the simplest and most efficient way to gather information. A code-free addition anywhere on your help desk site, you can collect data without requiring a login. This offers staff, parents, and teachers a fast, anonymous, and obstacle-free means to submit complaints and requests, such as school bus route requests, student login issues on school devices, or teachers reporting tech issues with TV monitors or other presentation equipment.
In other cases, schools alternatively have the possibility of requiring a secure login over webforms, keeping complaint and request submissions secure.
Either way, whether with or without a login, all Webforms have customizable fields to make submission easy and accurate, and resolution painless and fast.
3. Responding to a Downed Network
Challenge: Getting flooded with an unmanageable number of help tickets when the school's network goes down
Solution: Leaning on software's capabilities to address all similar issues in one go
A downed network can result in total chaos in today's schools. IT teams can easily get overwhelmed by the number of requests pouring in during an outage, whether regarding whiteboards, smart TVs, or tablets.
Luckily, most software tracking systems offer cloud capability, which is not susceptible to the setbacks of a downed network hosted on premises.
Furthermore, Issuetrak uses a feature called Global Issues to ensure IT teams can address any and all similar issues at once, especially in the urgent case of a downed network. This ability to alert all staff via Global Issues helps even the smallest IT teams shut down panic and clear out large portions of help tickets effectively.
4. Making the Most of Email Without Cramming Staff Inboxes
Challenge: Losing track of critical issues in lengthy email threads
Solution: Integrate email with a ticketing solution that organizes and prioritizes help requests.
An overflowing inbox is a familiar pain to all teachers, administrators, and IT staff.
However, teacher and staff emails can seamlessly integrate with software to process requests and set up task flows. This makes it easy for IT staff to track, troubleshoot, and solve their problems quickly.
IEM (Incoming Email) offers an Email-to-issue function that notifies and triages requests for the IT team. If a teacher reports a smashed screen or requests a Chromebook for a new student, their email will automatically create a help ticket and notify the tech team to get on it right away.
Outgoing Notifications are equally efficient in automating replies and notifying stakeholders of the status of their requests. Notifications keep everyone in the loop at all times, and any replies to these emails will automatically update the issue's status.
| ✨ Did you know? Schools can set up multiple email addresses so that requests are sent to the right department. This makes it easy for submitters to get issues resolved quickly. This is especially useful for overwhelmed teachers who would benefit from an easy-to-fill-form that, without mistake, gets routed to the right person. |
5. Spotting Trends to Get Rid of Commonly Encountered Issues
Challenge: IT teams often juggle recurring problems, often with the same devices, that create traffic jams in the IT ticketing queue.
Solution: Schools can reduce their tech stack by taking advantage of the incorporated Advanced Reporting Tools that software has to offer.
90% of issues are repeatable offenses that could have been preemptively addressed with the help of software reporting tools. Reporting tools offer transparency and trend-spotting opportunities to locate problematic technology or other assets in schools.
For example, schools can report on recurring types of issues they face. From there,
- IT teams have eyes on and can remove and replace any asset models that pose frequent problems.
- Administrators and staff can use reports to identify gaps; if users frequently request a password reset, then administrators can assemble a user training to prevent the same issue from recurring in the future.
Overall, superiors can gain visibility over issues occurring, while other IT personnel can spot trends and target areas for continued improvement.
6. Follow-ups and Creating Accountability
Challenge: School staff already have limited bandwidth, and it's difficult to follow up on duties or maintain accountability for completing much-needed tasks.
Solution: Software makes it easy for staff to know who is responsible for what, and when.
Software can automate any number of tedious tasks at regular intervals, ensuring nothing slips under the radar.
From device maintenance to facilities, school departments can maintain a strong digital and physical infrastructure in school environments.
For instance, with the help of Scheduled Issues in Issuetrak, schools never need to worry about missing regular maintenance deadlines for devices, facilities, or any other routine updates. Scheduled Issues help schools prevent devices from running into hardware compliance issues. Similarly, schools can alleviate concerns over facilities compliance, ensuring classrooms never go without heat, A/C, filter changes, etc.
Apart from maintenance, software automation can also regulate task flows, approvals, and other processes for change management so that schools will meet security and compliance measures. For example, if school IT departments want to create stricter password requirements for student devices, a Change Management policy can help ensure proper implementation of the change. This helps school IT departments comply with strict security standards, protecting student accounts, school reports, grades, and other sensitive data.
7. Efficient Asset Management
Challenge: Restocking school assets and tracking facility maintenance in a timely fashion
Solution: Using an Asset Management tool to execute 1:1 initiatives so that faculty and students have the devices they need to perform and succeed.
Whether new or refurbished, school devices have a typical lifecycle of 3-5 years (for laptops and desktops respectively). Schools will want a robust asset tracking system to maintain assets in the best condition possible, so that students and staff have access to the best tools available.
Using an Asset Management module offers various benefits:
- A robust database of all assets, including the ability to scan assets, helps school IT teams keep eyes on installed software, connected printers, necessary updates, etc. This helps preserve device security and student safety.
- Asset Management ensures compliance standards are always met, especially in regard to end-of-life asset reporting for older devices or staying up to date with software licensing.
- Asset Management also ensures schools don't waste money over lost or unusable devices. An iPad will never go missing from storage, or a malfunctioning piece of hardware can be decommissioned easily.
8. Budget Constraints
Challenge: School districts in general struggle to obtain the necessary funding for staff, materials, and technology.
Solution: Support desk software offers an affordable means to cut out redundancies and maximize the return on investment.
Many districts operate under tight budgets and thus require affordable and high-ROI solutions. Automation offers a low-cost guarantee that schools and school districts offer the most productive learning and working environments possible.
Automation workflows save schools thousands of hours in labor costs by ensuring work requests are appropriately assigned to the right parties at a given school in a district. By routing work to the necessary staff members, automations help reduce the likelihood of human error and even cut out the need for an employee to triage requests, thus reducing budget and time lost.
Plus, users can configure a software solution (and pricing structure) to match their preferences. Schools can use software configuration to exert total control over their process without having to spend additional dollars on other resources. This way, schools can still meet budget, and no one in the school system goes underserved.
9. Data Privacy
Challenge: IT technicians in schools struggle with maintaining security standards against new legislation and rising cyber hacking activity.
Solution: IT Support Desk Software protects data stored within it, thus satisfying legal or privacy requirements.
Compliance with laws like FERPA (Family Education Rights and Privacy Act) adds complexity to IT management. However, IT Support Desk Software commonly comes with built-in security features that, from the start, help ensure a secure baseline for data privacy.
Administrators can determine the appropriate permissions/access controls within software to protect data from unwanted parties. Additionally, users can decide between having basic or complex user permissions to restrict access to the right parties. Either way ensures a protected environment for students, teachers, and staff alike.
When considering which IT Support Software to choose, look for data masking, encryption, etc., as they are promising features that give assurance of a software solution's credibility. Issuetrak's security measures are a great benchmark if you want to know more. Other measures like regular security maintenance, network isolation, auditing, and much more are standard back-end procedures of support desk software that ensure student educational records stay safe.
Partner with Issuetrak K-12 IT Support Software
Issuetrak simplifies IT support for K-12 schools, combining helpdesk ticketing, asset management, and automated workflows in a single solution. Whether you're managing a large number of Chromebooks or troubleshooting classroom tech, Issuetrak keeps your district running smoothly and efficiently—saving your IT team time and resources. Speak with our experts to see how Issuetrak can be tailored to fit your school's IT management process.
Topics from this blog: Software Solutions Education Technology Compliance Asset Management it help desk
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