text: Amid all of the hype, and nay-saying, about the role of technology in schools, a key question has been muted: how can principals make sure technology works for their school as a reliable assistant, and not against it as an unwelcome distraction?
  With digital adoption thriving across the K-12 education sector, how can schools ensure that they’re making the most out of technology that, if used correctly, can be transformational?
  Below, The Educator speaks with Mike Dooner, marketing manager of content services at Japanese technology giant, Konica Minolta, who shares his views on this topic, as well as what the company is doing to help schools reach their full potential in 2018.
  TE: In what ways can principals better streamline tasks such as student record management and print management to reduce administrative clutter?
  MD: Konica Minolta’s ECM solutions offer practical, proven benefits to improve the flow of educational information, speed up retrieval, control access, and maintain enhanced security. Konica Minolta ECM solutions manage information through its complete lifecycle; from creation or capture to active routing, processing, access by authorised users, storage in secure archives, and deletion according to defined records management policies. Konica Minolta’s education print management services and device management solutions help schools control and bring accountability to printed output. This includes monitoring and controlling both student and staff printing, integrating with back-end transactional systems, and charging back costs to students.
  TE: I understand that Konica Minolta is helping to speed up the enrolment process for principals. Can you tell us more about this?
  MD: The faster an applicant receives an acceptance letter, the sooner the school becomes a real option, and the more likely the applicant is to accept. With an enterprise content management (ECM) solution from Konica Minolta, you can accelerate your review process and respond more quickly to applicants. A faster response means a greater opportunity to get the candidates that you want. Principals can cut weeks off the admissions processing cycle with ECM. This accelerates the admissions process by eliminating delays, making the review process for counsellors and staff easier, and communicating decisions to best-fit applicants faster than the competition.
  TE: Flexible printing solutions have become an expectation in most schools looking to improve teaching and learning outcomes. How can technology help with this?
  MD: Today’s students and teachers demand increasingly flexible printing solutions, offering them access to every device and convenient walk-up printing. They want to produce daily documents like timetables, literature lists, or class handouts whenever it's convenient and wherever they are on the school campus. With mobile printing, students use their notebooks or other mobile devices to print individual pages or comprehensive documents without any specific drivers installed. Pull-printing lets students release their print jobs from off-campus locations and produce their documents whenever and wherever required. Thus, pull-printing also avoids printed but forgotten jobs and wasted paper.
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