https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog Practical writing on school operations, workplacements, school data, and AI in Australian education. en-au Sun, 03 May 2026 22:54:35 GMT https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/daily-brief-2026-05-04 https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/daily-brief-2026-05-04 Sun, 03 May 2026 22:52:01 GMT Brodie McGee Carolyn Evans named University of Melbourne's 22nd Vice-Chancellor. Victorian teachers begin rolling half-day strikes. UTS staff walk off. UQ's cyber resilience approach. daily-brief governance higher-education https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/where-your-operational-load-is-actually-building-up https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/where-your-operational-load-is-actually-building-up Sun, 03 May 2026 22:00:00 GMT Brodie McGee 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. operations diagnostic school-leadership admin-load https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/daily-brief-2026-05-03 https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/daily-brief-2026-05-03 Sat, 02 May 2026 22:56:32 GMT Brodie McGee Australia's new tertiary regulator has statutory powers from this week. Victoria's curriculum body gets a $222m rescue. Plus international student welfare and a uni fees bill. daily-brief governance higher-education https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/daily-brief-2026-05-02 https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/daily-brief-2026-05-02 Fri, 01 May 2026 22:56:04 GMT Brodie McGee GenAI is inventing First Nations languages for the classroom. Victoria offers teachers 28% over four years and gets told no. Tasmania settles for less. daily-brief workforce indigenous-education https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/when-the-paperwork-is-the-policy https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/when-the-paperwork-is-the-policy Fri, 01 May 2026 02:45:53 GMT Brodie McGee 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. governance workforce documentation school-leadership https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/daily-brief-2026-05-01 https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/daily-brief-2026-05-01 Fri, 01 May 2026 00:30:46 GMT Brodie McGee A regulator is picking a public university's chancellor for the first time. Plus teacher retention data, Tasmania's MSO debate, and Victoria's Free TAFE bet. daily-brief governance workforce https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/notes-from-my-first-100-systems-conversations-with-school-leaders https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/notes-from-my-first-100-systems-conversations-with-school-leaders Wed, 25 Mar 2026 09:00:00 GMT Brodie McGee After 100 first conversations with school principals, deputies, and business managers, the patterns are remarkably consistent. Here are the ones I keep coming back to. founder leadership patterns https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/the-most-underused-tool-in-school-operations-a-clear-data-model https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/the-most-underused-tool-in-school-operations-a-clear-data-model Wed, 04 Mar 2026 09:00:00 GMT Brodie McGee 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. data model operations leadership https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/what-teachers-actually-want-from-school-ai-training https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/what-teachers-actually-want-from-school-ai-training Wed, 18 Feb 2026 09:00:00 GMT Brodie McGee 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. AI professional development staff training https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/moving-schools-from-consumers-to-creators https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/moving-schools-from-consumers-to-creators Thu, 05 Feb 2026 02:59:33 GMT Digital Attitudes 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. agentic coding school infrastructure custom software work placements school systems https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/when-workflow-tools-become-another-problem https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/when-workflow-tools-become-another-problem Wed, 28 Jan 2026 09:00:00 GMT Brodie McGee 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. tool sprawl systems operations https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/back-to-school-readiness-in-operational-terms https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/back-to-school-readiness-in-operational-terms Wed, 07 Jan 2026 09:00:00 GMT Brodie McGee 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. back to school operations readiness https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/end-of-year-operations-a-quiet-checklist https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/end-of-year-operations-a-quiet-checklist Wed, 17 Dec 2025 09:00:00 GMT Brodie McGee 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. end of year operations checklist https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/three-signs-your-school-s-reporting-is-broken https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/three-signs-your-school-s-reporting-is-broken Wed, 26 Nov 2025 09:00:00 GMT Brodie McGee 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. reporting data leadership https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/the-case-for-doing-nothing-for-one-full-term https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/the-case-for-doing-nothing-for-one-full-term Wed, 05 Nov 2025 09:00:00 GMT Brodie McGee 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. change management consulting leadership https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/why-your-ai-policy-shouldn-t-be-14-pages-long https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/why-your-ai-policy-shouldn-t-be-14-pages-long Wed, 15 Oct 2025 09:00:00 GMT Brodie McGee 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. AI policy leadership https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/what-a-real-systems-audit-finds-and-what-schools-are-surprised-by https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/what-a-real-systems-audit-finds-and-what-schools-are-surprised-by Wed, 24 Sep 2025 09:00:00 GMT Brodie McGee After 30+ school audits, the things that surprise leadership teams are remarkably consistent. The actual operational truth is rarely what was on the agenda. systems audit consulting operations https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/the-deputy-principal-s-47-tab-problem https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/the-deputy-principal-s-47-tab-problem Wed, 03 Sep 2025 09:00:00 GMT Brodie McGee 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. leadership operations tool sprawl https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/i-left-teaching-to-fix-this-here-s-why https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/i-left-teaching-to-fix-this-here-s-why Wed, 13 Aug 2025 09:00:00 GMT Brodie McGee 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. founder teaching why https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/designing-workflows-that-survive-term-4 https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/designing-workflows-that-survive-term-4 Wed, 23 Jul 2025 09:00:00 GMT Brodie McGee 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. process design operations change management https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/ai-in-our-staffroom-what-stuck-what-didn-t https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/ai-in-our-staffroom-what-stuck-what-didn-t Wed, 02 Jul 2025 09:00:00 GMT Brodie McGee 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. AI professional development teaching https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/five-questions-to-ask-before-you-build-another-dashboard https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/five-questions-to-ask-before-you-build-another-dashboard Wed, 11 Jun 2025 09:00:00 GMT Brodie McGee 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. dashboards data leadership https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/notes-from-a-year-coordinating-placements-with-a-spreadsheet https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/notes-from-a-year-coordinating-placements-with-a-spreadsheet Wed, 21 May 2025 09:00:00 GMT Brodie McGee 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. workplacements VCE VM spreadsheets https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/the-hidden-cost-of-seven-different-login-screens https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/the-hidden-cost-of-seven-different-login-screens Wed, 30 Apr 2025 09:00:00 GMT Brodie McGee 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. operations tool sprawl admin reduction https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/what-our-work-placement-system-actually-does-in-week-one-of-term https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/what-our-work-placement-system-actually-does-in-week-one-of-term Wed, 09 Apr 2025 09:00:00 GMT Brodie McGee 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. workplacements VCE VM systems https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/why-we-ll-fix-it-next-term-is-the-most-expensive-sentence-in-your-school https://digitalattitudes.com.au/blog/why-we-ll-fix-it-next-term-is-the-most-expensive-sentence-in-your-school Wed, 12 Mar 2025 09:00:00 GMT Brodie McGee Schools love this phrase. It feels reasonable, even responsible. The trouble is what happens between now and the term that never quite arrives. operations change management admin reduction