Imagine 600,000 devices requested by one small state in the USA and an order for 200,000 devices by the Department for Education in England, with similar-sized numbers across European countries and beyond.

Millions of devices were all wanted as soon as possible - and preferably “yesterday” - when lockdown left schools and teachers with only one way to keep educating their pupils: online learning.

Despite some criticism of the situation in Scotland, our experience is that other nations admire Scotland for our learning infrastructure, our bold 1:1 programmes and our universal access to the Glow national digital learning network, Office 365 and Google G Suite. All of these features afforded agility in the delivery of education through technology.

What we are looking at now is a vast increase - accelerated by the coronavirus - in personalised technology access for our young people, possibly to a 1:1 model. It is not as simple, however, as just purchasing and distributing a device to students.

Related: Glasgow defends mass rollout of iPads to schools

Coronavirus: School forced to fundraise to keep pupils learning

Support: School closures - a guide to the tech to help you cope

Online teaching: 5 essential lessons from four years at our ‘e-school’

At XMA - an IT solution and training provider - we have worked with UK governments to support those needs. The Scottish government, for example, has recently invested an extra £25 million to secure digital devices for around 70,000 pupils to make sure no one is digitally excluded, and that education delivery in Scotland is resilient.

Coronavirus: Making the most of devices for online learning

Here are six ways to get the very best out of that sort of funding:

1. Start with why

As Simon Sinek says in the book Start With Why, “People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.” If you are to lead a local authority or school community through an educational technology transformation, you must be able to articulate a clear vision as to why you are doing this.

2. Devices don’t teach children

Teachers teach children. Failing to invest in professional learning that is relevant, meaningful and sustained will dilute the benefits for your staff and young people. It is that simple, and we’ve seen that in many examples around the world. We need to get that piece right. This is about evolving a school culture, and it is your staff who will lead your charge, not the technology.

3. Infrastructure matters

The experience a young person has in a classroom should not be a poor man’s version of what they have at home or in the coffee shop. Many of the learning experiences that you can provide with technology - like visiting your pick of 20,000 museums from across the world on a virtual field trip - can only be afforded by a consistently excellent standard of connectivity. It is just a fact.

4. Manage wisely

When pupils have an internet-enabled personal learning device, issued by schools, there is still a safeguarding responsibility. The gold-standard approach is to manage that device remotely at the local authority or school level. That way you have control of web filtering, apps and settings that are pushed to the device with the ability to lock and wipe the device if it is lost or stolen. There is a range of mobile device-management (MDM) tools out there that offer this functionality for local IT teams. Without them, you are heading into uncharted waters, and we’ve yet to see successful large deployments without them being in place.

5. Work towards a sustainable future

No one would deny the challenges around financial sustainability for this kind of model. If it is not to be a one-off event, there is a need to build in a refresh cycle for the devices as this becomes the norm in your school or local authority.

6. Build a community

One advantage of knowing that every child and family have access to a device is the potential of new ways to connect to the community. Think of a device at home as a new portal for parental engagement, family learning, council services, community literacy and numeracy programs, access to job opportunities, training and qualifications. Our communities are strengthened when we know everyone is connected and not isolated. Within schools, there is vast potential for new curriculum pathways, clubs, entrepreneurship, digital leadership and developing connections with businesses and third-sector organisations. 

We recognise that none of this is easy. A device is only really one part of how we develop resilience in our education system. We would never want schools to be digital all-day learning and teaching spaces. That would be a terrible experience for all of us.

But when we empower our young people with technology in an equitable way, we expand approaches to learning and teaching available to us - and afford our schools some agility when learning spaces change from school to home.

Michael Conlon is a digital learning consultant and former teacher, based in Perth and Kinross