With a mission to reimagine learning and change the world, Blue Valley School District in Overland Park, Kansas, has inspired generations of students in their most formative years. The district applies technology in innovative ways to offer new and exciting educational opportunities, including advanced computing classes, to more students in its elementary, middle, and high schools at a fast pace.
“The teachers who create labs in our environment love the freedom Azure Lab Services offers, allowing them to work on their labs virtually anywhere driving their curricula with impressive flexibility.”
Jaime Sutherland, Cybersecurity Engineer, Blue Valley School District
Delivering diverse and equitable access to education—in person and virtually
Whether engineering students are creating rivet drawings or yearbook classes are laying out pages for the next issue, everything from trials and testing to development and design is seamless and easy. The students’ creativity can roam free, no longer tethered to one device or even one physical classroom. That’s because now, with the district’s use of Microsoft Azure Lab Services, students can go home and pick up right where they left off. Through flexible and highly available lab virtual machines (VMs) in Microsoft Azure, the district offers students the same high-quality experience for in-person, remote, and hybrid learning. And it empowers its teachers with the solution’s ease of use and customization capabilities along with enhanced student engagement.
“Students are no longer limited to district-managed devices to complete assignments and can access tools on a computer at home - just as they do in the classroom,” says Jaime Sutherland, Cybersecurity Engineer at Blue Valley School District. “Our teachers love the fact they can use their tablets to configure their labs and provide a diverse and equitable experience to every student no matter where that student chooses to work.”
Learning on flexible, preconfigured, and easy-to-use lab virtual machines
Innovation and experimentation lie at the heart of the district’s institutional ethos. So, when several of its vendors started to move to the cloud, Blue Valley Schools opted to shift some of its key workloads to Azure. It then rolled out Azure Lab Services to bridge the gap from classroom to home during lockdowns related to COVID-19.
The district saw a lot of promise in providing immediate access to preconfigured lab VMs, and there was immediate uptake. “The teachers who create labs in our environment love the freedom Azure Lab Services offers, allowing them to work on their labs virtually anywhere driving their curricula with impressive flexibility,” explains Sutherland.
As an early adopter of Lab Services, Blue Valley Schools took an organic approach to training teachers and support staff and rolling it out across different departments. The district also adapted aspects of its curriculum to create more opportunities for hands-on lab learning and unlock maximum value from Azure, including the ability to extend instruction outside of single school sessions in physical labs. “We have had an Azure presence for some time, so it made sense to integrate it across the district and have it do exactly what we configured it to do,” says Sutherland.
To get Lab Services up and running, the district’s IT department followed step-by-step, web-based product documentation from Microsoft. Then, as needed, it tapped into dedicated Azure product and customer engagement teams for help with advanced networking, integrating programs like Canvas and Adobe Creative Cloud, and other specific requests. Sutherland notes, “These add-ons are wonderful tools to have in our Azure Lab Services toolbox.”
Managing labs through Microsoft Teams
Although people can access Lab Services through a dedicated Microsoft online portal, the district decided to manage all its labs through Microsoft Teams. “Managing Lab Services VMs through Microsoft Teams gives teachers the added benefit of all the Teams functionality along with their labs, including the ability to share files and other course-related information with their students and other teachers,” says Sutherland.
The IT department ultimately chose the combination of Lab Services and Teams for its ease of use, which was a prerequisite for any potential solution. “A lot of teachers have played around with Teams but haven’t spent a lot of time in it,” says Sutherland. “By having them manage their labs through Teams, we’ve helped them gain experience. They’ve started to say, ‘OK, Teams is robust, Lab Services is robust, and the two of those seem like the perfect combination.’”
Giving teachers and staff more control and convenience
In addition to unlocking learning opportunities, Blue Valley Schools realized multiple efficiencies within its IT department after introducing Lab Services. As Sutherland notes, “Azure Lab Services has helped us significantly lower the priority of on-premises hardware refreshes.”
IT staff must manage security for all district on-premises computers, but in the cloud-based Lab Services, they can create “islands” and give teachers administrative rights. With those, district educators and staff don’t need to navigate the lengthy software certification workflows, including security and compatibility checks, that exist on-premises. “In their Lab Services environment, lab creators can install the software they need within a couple hours, eliminating the previous three-week process and the need to even engage IT at all,” shares Sutherland.
To further streamline lab development, Blue Valley Schools deployed Azure Compute Gallery, a shared image gallery for VM templates. The district created three golden images within its environment and published them to Azure Compute Gallery, giving teachers the ability to decide which image to use for their class. For example, the district previously implemented STEM learning modules from the Project Lead The Way curriculum, which come to life through a CAD suite of applications like Revit, Inventor, and Inventor CAM with large resource footprints. If an engineering teacher requires this set of applications, they can select that golden image, make any customizations, publish it to their lab, and be on their way.
There are separate images for Adobe Creative Cloud and a blank Windows environment image available for use across the district, each with cloud-based web filtering built in. “Once they’re comfortable with it, teachers can have a new class lab spun up in about an hour by leveraging our golden images and applying the desired customizations,” says Sutherland. Teachers can also take charge and upload their own images for other teachers to use and repurpose to fit their specific class needs.
A robust, cloud-based solution with continued growth and long-term benefits
Following the initial push for Lab Services during the peak of pandemic-related school closures, Blue Valley Schools is seeing continued usage and daily growth among students and teachers alike. “Some of our teachers feel they can’t live without Azure Lab Services now because it affords them the ability to continue education outside of the short 45 minutes that they have with their students,” says Sutherland.
Teachers praise the high availability, intuitive design, and self-service element of both Lab Services and Compute Gallery. “Building a lab from scratch was both fast and easy when we first adopted the service,” Sutherland adds. “At the time, it took roughly an hour to provision fully. Microsoft has improved the service and made what was already easy even easier, reducing new lab provisioning time down to just 20 minutes.” And IT staff eliminated their need to oversee day-to-day management of labs by giving teachers that ability and access.
This is the district’s third year using Lab Services, and Sutherland expects adoption to soon hit an all-time high. “Teachers who’ve embraced Azure Lab Services are its biggest advocates within the district,” he says. “Just yesterday, one middle school teacher sparked the interest of eight others. They saw how we can set up the resource and hand it off to them and the good things that come after that.”
Outside of existing use cases in engineering and yearbook classes, Blue Valley Schools appreciates that Lab Services can handle new curricula with minimal lead time. “An art teacher could theoretically have a very specific art application that they’re teaching and, within an hour, have an Azure lab environment spun up to host their students,” says Sutherland. “Microsoft has made the product robust enough to support a plethora of potential use cases and provide immense value, and if we have new ideas, the product team is always helpful and receptive to us.”
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“Some of our teachers feel they can’t live without Azure Lab Services now because it affords them the ability to continue education outside of the short 45 minutes that they have with their students.”
Jaime Sutherland, Cybersecurity Engineer, Blue Valley School District
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