Practical writing from inside the work.
Practical writing on AI, systems, data and digital transformation in Australian education, from Digital Attitudes.
- A starter outline for your next staff PD session
A free planner that takes audience size, time available, topic and experience level, and produces a structured outline that respects how PD actually lands in schools. - Your school's AI policy, in one page
Most school AI policies run to 14 pages and live in a folder no one opens. We made a free generator that produces a one-page version your staff might actually read. - What's your school actually paying for, twice?
We made a tool that lets you tick the platforms your school uses, then shows you where they overlap and how much that overlap is costing you each year. - Twelve questions to find where your school's operational load is actually building up
We built a free three-minute diagnostic that asks twelve specific questions about data, workflows, reporting and continuity, then tells you which area is in the worst shape and what to do first. - When the paperwork is the policy
ANU council signed a voluntary undertaking last week giving TEQSA the chair of its chancellor selection panel. The bigger story isn't the headline. It's that the regulator didn't need to legislate. - What school leaders keep telling me about their systems
In first conversations with principals, deputies and business managers, the same patterns keep coming up. Here are the ones I return to. - The most underused tool in school operations: a clear data model
Schools spend hundreds of thousands on platforms and almost nothing on the question that determines whether any of them work. Where does each piece of information actually live, and who is allowed to change it. - What teachers actually want from school AI training
After dozens of staff PD sessions on AI, the gap between what gets booked and what gets used is wide and consistent. The teachers who get the most out of these sessions ask remarkably similar questions. - Moving Schools from Consumers to Creators
Most discussion about AI in education still sits at the classroom level. But what about the infrastructure that holds a school together? Schools are starting to move from being consumers of technology to designers of their own systems. - When 'workflow tools' become another problem
The platform that was meant to consolidate your school's workflows can quickly become the eleventh tab in the deputy principal's browser. Three patterns to watch for. - Back-to-school readiness, in operational terms
The first week of the school year is the most expensive week of the year for any operational mistake. Here's how to spend the last fortnight of January cheaply. - End-of-year operations: a quiet checklist
The version of an operational checklist that gets used is not the one that's most thorough. It's the one that fits on a page and respects how exhausted everyone already is. - Three signs your school's reporting is broken
The reporting cycle is the place where the smallest data quality issues turn into the largest leadership decisions. These are the three signs that something has gone wrong upstream. - The case for doing nothing for one full term
The hardest piece of consulting advice to give a leadership team is sometimes 'don't do anything yet'. Term-on-term churn is more expensive than schools realise. - Why your 'AI policy' shouldn't be 14 pages long
I have read seventeen school AI policies in the last six months. The longest was 22 pages. The most useful was one page. The relationship between length and usefulness was not what you'd hope. - What a real systems audit finds (and what schools are surprised by)
In the school audits we have run, what surprises leadership teams is remarkably consistent. The operational truth is rarely what was on the agenda. - The deputy principal's 47-tab problem
I spent a Tuesday morning shadowing a deputy principal. By recess she had 47 tabs open. None of them were unnecessary. All of them were a sign of something. - I left teaching to fix this. Here's why.
I went part-time in the classroom to start Digital Attitudes. Not because I had a brilliant business idea. Because I couldn't keep watching the same problems repeat. - Designing workflows that survive Term 4
Term 4 is the operational stress test for any school. The workflows that survive it are the ones that were designed for fatigue, not for a perfect day. - AI in our staffroom: what stuck, what didn't
We rolled out AI tools to a Year 7-12 staff of 92 across most of last year. Some of it stuck. Most of it didn't. Here's the honest tally. - Five questions to ask before you build another dashboard
Most school dashboards look great in the demo and gather dust by Term 3. The questions below are the cheapest way to avoid being the school that builds the dashboard nobody opens. - Notes from a year coordinating placements with a spreadsheet
Before I built any software, I spent a year coordinating Year 11 placements out of one Google Sheet. These are the things that made me want to build the system, in the order I noticed them. - The hidden cost of seven different login screens
I counted eleven separate platforms a head of department had to log in to in a single morning. None of them talked to each other. All of them counted toward her workload, even though none of them were her job. - What our work placement system actually does in week one of term
Most software is sold on its dashboards. The real test is what it does when 84 students need a placement next Tuesday and three host providers haven't replied. - Why 'we'll fix it next term' is the most expensive sentence in your school
Schools love this phrase. It feels reasonable, even responsible. The trouble is what happens between now and the term that never quite arrives.