Does the cloud scale to schools?

The Boy McIntosh has a neat blog post about why the cloud is important for education. He tells us that nearly 200K Australian Dollars was saved by an online science test for 65000 students being hosted on the cloud rather than on servers in the education department. That’s pretty compelling stuff. He concludes the post by saying that “It works on a State level. It needs to start working more on a school by school level.”

He’s right of course, but does this kind of approach really scale down to individual school level? Especially to small school size? Or does it depend on economies of scale, where individual schools must work together for best results? Blimey, imagine that: schools collaborating instead of competing. Now there’s a thought...

And you know it’s maybe also a reason why we need to retain some kind of ‘state’ provision for education (be that at national or local level) - some kind of organisation that can broker these kinds of large scale deals that will end up saving money (so that authorities or schools can spend it on something useful, such as ensuring robust, speedy net access, not so that we can just get big tax breaks or syphon the savings into a few more cruise missiles).