SaaS for schools: Why cloud-based software is a big win for IT admins

It comes with the territory — if you’re a school system IT administrator, you probably find yourself caught between competing needs on a regular basis.

There’s the pie-in-the-sky idea of what teachers and principals want to accomplish using technology. And then there’s the reality of what you have the budget and time to pilot, implement, and support.

You probably didn’t go into the ed-tech field because you enjoyed impeding student learning or cramping teachers’ styles. So whether you decide to push back on certain initiatives or just swallow your reservations and take on more work, either door leads to a painful reality.

The great news is you now have an escape hatch: software-as-a-service (SaaS).

The benefits of SaaS for schools

As you know, edtech software that’s delivered as a service is fully hosted and managed for you, reducing your burden exponentially. But this is only part of the reason cloud-based solutions are taking off across industries, including education.

Get easy scalability and flexibility.

“Try before you buy” is a good rule of thumb when it comes to software, and with a SaaS like LanSchool Air, running pilots becomes significantly easier and more affordable.

With no hardware-related expenses, you can set up a trial run in minutes for a small group or even an individual classroom. If the pilot goes well, it only takes a few clicks to scale up and deliver that software to your entire school or district. LanSchool Air offers a 30-day free trial because we want IT admins and teachers alike to feel confident about the value of our SaaS before committing to a longer-term purchase.

The other great news about a SaaS is that it helps you establish predictable costs, unlike hosting on-premise, which can mean unexpected hardware maintenance and expensive upgrades. For most IT admins, paying a monthly or annual fee beats dealing with server-related surprises any day.

Reduce deployment time and improve feature adoption.

SaaS offerings may vary, but most can be implemented in a matter of minutes. LanSchool Air deployment only takes about 15 minutes of your time. Then, your teachers simply have to link LanSchool Air to Google Classroom to identify student devices and import their class data.

But what you might find even more exciting than the quick deployment is thinking about all the software upgrades you won’t have to manage. Cloud-based companies are able to push new features and functionality to the entire user base on a rolling basis without disruption. Because LanSchool Air takes a strategy of small, incremental updates, end user acceptance and adoption of our full feature set is high, and formal training time is reduced significantly.

More importantly, you won’t have to personally install updated software on each and every student device when an update rolls out — the software will update automatically across your entire footprint. With more than 50 percent of teachers reporting they now have a 1:1 student-device ratio, this is a massive time saver.

Get out of the maintenance and support hot seat.

With a SaaS, you’re not hosting the software, which means you’re also mercifully not responsible for patching it, securing it, or making sure it runs quickly. Your provider will have a team of experts who know their software and work to pro-actively ensure it functions at full steam.

And if you do experience any technical issues or simply have questions on how to use the software, you can reach out to the provider for support and training. You get to serve as the point of contact, instead of the technical subject matter expert.

Encourage your teachers to try LanSchool Air

So when it comes time to evaluate (or re-evaluate) software, there’s a good case for guiding your teachers and administrators toward a SaaS solution like LanSchool Air. In our case, not only will your teachers get a powerful, industry-leading classroom management software that’s constantly evolving with their changing needs, but they’ll get it sooner because you can implement it in 15 minutes without needing additional servers.