Meet Maree Turra School Administrative Manager, Lindfield Learning Village
How long have you been at Lindfield Learning Village? I’ve been at Lindfield now for two and a half years. This school is only in its fifth year, so we’re a toddler, a school-age child. When I started, the school was getting processes in place.
Tell us about your work environment. I have 10 team members dispersed across a big campus. I sit in an office with two other people — we have a main, public reception with two staff members there. Our enrolment team is in another office, with student services on another level. I also have staff in Science and Food Tech in another area completely, so we’re very dispersed. Our business manager is down the hall.
What are some of the big tech wins you’ve had here? When I joined the team, they were in the process of going digital — most of the school student records had already been scanned in. We finished that off, and then we’ve put all the files in the cloud. And now our whole school is on Teams.
How did learning from home impact you and change the way your team works? It was really hard. Communication was key, and to not be afraid of technology. Our team caught up on Teams for virtual coffee — it was like a ‘virtual morning tea’.
How has tech helped with collaboration? We were all working in different versions of documents — now with Sharepoint — we can all access documents and work in them and pull up the previous versions if we need them. Our staff do everything over teams–we have all of our chats — common chats, emergency chats, senior executive chats and SASS chats.
Lindfield Learning Village is a K-12 school run by stages in a multi-level, modern campus in Sydney’s metropolitan north.
What tools are you using? We use Microsoft 365 and Google — we sort of flip between the two. The teachers mostly use Google. We’ve set up OneNote in our teams in our admin team.
What’s your one piece of tech advice? Don’t be frightened of it. You can’t break it — it can always be fixed. 3