Best IT Solution For a Brand-New School? 411
Iain writes "I'm a teacher at a British 'City Academy' (ages 11-19) that is going to move into a new building next year. Management is deciding now on the IT that the students will use in the new building, as everything will be built from scratch. Currently, the school has one ICT suite per department, each containing about 25-30 PCs. My issue with this model is that it means these suites are only rarely used for a bit of googling or typing up assignments, not as interactive teaching tools. The head likes the idea of moving to a thin client solution, with the same one room per department plan, as he see the cost benefits. However, I have seen tablet PCs used to great effect, with every single classroom having 20-30 units which the students use as 'electronic workbooks,' for want of a better phrase. This allows every lesson to fully utilize IT (multimedia resources, Internet access, instant handout and retrieval of learning resources, etc.) and all work to be stored centrally. My question is: In your opinion, what is the best way for a school to use IT (traditional computer lab, OLPCs, etc.) and what hardware is out there to best serve that purpose? Fat clients for IT/Media lessons and thin client for the rest? Thin client tablets? Giving each student a laptop to take home? Although, obviously, cost is an issue, we have a significant budget, so it should not be the only consideration."
What not to do (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Stay away from laptops and tablets! (Score:2, Funny)
Stay away from pencil and paper! The students only get lazy because they don't have to remember anything. Slates are much better for most subjects.
Have you seen... (Score:3, Funny)
The price of slate these days?
Oh for smileys on /.
Re:Tablet Cart, plz (Score:2, Funny)
Because you might just come out of school being socially well-adjusted, instead of the closed-in-nerd you are now.
Re:Create a portable lab (Score:5, Funny)
I took that GCSE a couple of years back... there's a handful of multiple choice questions from the exam that I won't forget quickly.
One described a service similar to Google Earth (same basic thing but without the brand name) and asked why it couldn't be used by the police to catch criminals. Alongside the correct answers that it wasn't real-time and didn't have high enough resolution there was "because criminals could hide under umbrellas" and "because you could only catch fat criminals, not thin ones"
Another was to tick all the true statements about RFID chips... as well as the sensible ones there was the absolute gem, "You shouldn't keep too many close together in case they join together and form an evil network". No joke, their words not mine. Evil network.
Over the course of the past papers we did we gradually learned the stock answers that the examiners were looking for... truly was a parallel world that they were living in.
Seems our school had realised that it was a shitty course - ours was the last year before they switched to a different exam board's IT course, with a different syllabus that was apparently much better.