success Stories we move

With its 314 municipalities and 35,000 students, Tarn county represents the archetype of the rural territory. “For several years, a strong dynamic between the association of the mayors of Tarn and the Ministry of National Education has made it possible to implement a policy of equipment coordinated around digital equipment and digital workspaces (ENT)”, Pierre Clot, county educational advisor for digital uses, explains.

This harmonization makes it possible to both simplify the training of teachers and their adaptation within the framework of their professional mobility.

Pierre Clot is delighted that the choice of the operator ENT (ONE1D – Open Digital Education) brings satisfaction, but he underlines the difficulties encountered in the management of digital devices. “Installing applications on each of these is extremely time-consuming and was a complete deterrent, so the use was generally limited to native applications that did not require specific installations.”

“The minimalist uses were all the more reduced as the interaction between the different tools was inoperative : display of the screen of a student’s tablet on the interactive whiteboard, for example”, Pierre Clot specifies.

This fleet management problem comes back to the first operations within the framework of the ENR program Rural Digital Schools. “All the solutions deployed so far have never proved convincing : they’re often incomplete, complex to implement, unreliable, and overall with unsatisfactory value for the budget”, the educational advisor explains.

It was at Educatec 2018 that Pierre Clot and his colleagues met the idruide team. The idruide Education suite responds to these issues with its simplified fleet management and classroom management solutions. They provide teachers with the digital tools necessary to fulfill their educational mission.

“However, a major obstacle made it ill-suited to our reality on the field. Each tablet was named and attributed to a single student, which was inconceivable for communities with a modest budget. It’s impossible to acquire a tablet for each student in a rural school !”, Pierre Clot recalls. “We were able to measure the listening skills, the consideration of expectations and the responsiveness of the idruide team.”

“Barely ten days after our meeting at Educatec and our first discussions on the need to share the use of a tablet, an email informed us that the multi-user / multi-account solution was born at idruide !”, says Christophe Drillaud, a referent teacher to digital uses (eRUN) in the district of Mazamet, in Tarn.

The pilot-project took place in the constituencies of Lavaur, Mazamet and Gaillac. Several challenges punctuated it.

First of all, it was necessary to optimize the use of digital tools in schools, through a county dynamic. This required the establishment of a global, coherent, and truly operational organization. In the same vein, this involved simplified monitoring of the fleet of tablets and applications.

Another imperative was the interconnection of the ENT with the usual digital tools. All of that in an environment with a degraded Internet speed, without the use of 4G, in places where schools are forced to use the satellite network to bring connectivity to the classroom.

“The context of investment aid to schools through the renewal of the ENIR (Innovative Digital Schools and Rurality) plan made it possible to think about continuing the adventure. Very quickly, on-site experimentation was envisaged”, points out Christophe Drillaud. 

idruide started with an experiment on 3 schools, covering 350 pupils and 14 teachers.

“Proposed as an experiment at a school in St. Amans Soult with 5 classes, the implementation of the multi-user/multi-account configuration and the feedback of information launched on 25 tablets at the same time started by beating a connection that is sufficient for “normal” access, but too low in this scenario.”

“However, once installed, the configuration and handling of the tablets are considered simple and quickly adopted by teachers and students”, according to Christophe Drillaud.

“With each device being assigned to a student in each class, the use is organized by the teaching team to diversify the terms of use : by half or whole class, depending on the need to use the digital tool to every student”, he continues. “Thus, depending on a specific need or a pedagogical moment requiring its use, the student will get the assigned tablet and use it with the teacher’s agreement.”

“Since our first meeting, the solution has evolved considerably, gaining both in performance and simplicity for the user, thanks to a gradual simplification of the interface despite increasingly extensive possibilities”, explains Pierre Clot.

“The educational uses have been strengthened in a much more secure and controlled environment. The solution now integrates a powerful and truly functional Internet filtering system that meets institutional expectations. We were far from it with the previous academic proxy.”

“Securing Internet access, page sharing, access to sound, camera and applications by controlling one or all of the tablets by the teacher allows secure and confident work”, the eRUN confirms.

Roome allows teachers to animate their class by sharing documents, creating groups of students, and projecting the screen of a tablet on other devices. “The ease of distribution and differentiated dissemination of information for one or more students or for a group, allows the use of adapted applications (Défitables, Mathador, Calcul @ tice, Heure, Scratch junior…)”, Christophe Drillaud says.

“The distribution of the same exercise for everyone and the distribution of different exercises into multiple groups makes it easier to set up collaborative projects around an ENT. The projection of one of the student tablets on the digital whiteboard allows the display of the student’s research work or its production (written, oral, creation of exercises).”

“From this student proposal, collective discussion, confrontation and justification allow the development of collaborative solutions (or problems !).”

“All of this culminates in a direct integration of ENT via idruide, which is in the process of being finalized”, the educational advisor concludes. “Now, everything seems to be in place to calmly think about a generalized deployment, optimized both technically and pedagogically.”

Stonehenge Education is now advised in Tarn. Co-development with ENT ODE services is underway.