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."
Re:Sunray... (Score:4, Informative)
I second that. Thin clients offer the best RIO due to their low ongoing operational costs. Basically you'll be paying for a good sysadmin, plus commercial software for the server, if you need that.
Sunrays in particular are good because Solaris is free - you don't have per seat licensing fees (unless you're using them with Windows Server). If you need Windows, however, they can do that too.
Another issue to consider is security and insurance costs. Sunrays are not an attractive target for thieves because they are useless without the server. You don't even need to lock them down. If you go with real computers instead of thin clients, you will have theft, and your insurance costs will be higher.
Old Skool Works! (Score:2, Informative)
I live in Kuwait and during my time in college, instructors have tried various "electronic" solutions like a smart board or a basic power point presentation, avoiding being interactive with students on a blackboard.
In all cases, it was always a bad idea. The smart board had problems (virus infcetions, IP conflicts, windows crashes, ...etc.) and power point presentations were dull -- myself and many others were almost asleep and drooling (and I was sitting in the first row!).
The instructor's solution to the power point presentation pandemic? Back to the blackboard and everyone woke up.
I'm in for well-maintained labs, and would stir away from giving each student a laptop/tablet. The students would abuse those machines much more than they'd benefit from them.
Teachers are there to interact with students, but by giving each student a machine, the attention would be diverted to these boxes and teachers would start pushing content into students' boxes...
Laptop Carts, maybe one room with a few desktops (Score:3, Informative)
Laptop Carts are the way to go. They are small, efficient, mobile, and more than enough for any task needed in school.
I'd say 1-2 carts with a classroom's worth of laptops, a wireless router/AP, and wireless printer (or regular printer plugged into a wireless router/ap that can act as a print server). Brand would be whoever can offer the best support contract, Dell, HP, etc. Stay away from OLPC or EEE's while I love Open Source they are too crippled and you can always install Linux (or live CDs) on a regular laptop if the desire is there.
Then if there would be the room/money available have one lab with desktops for any/all other needs. The other item would be USB thumbdrives for each student (they can be reasonably small like 1GB) and lock out the ability to save to anything but the thumbdrives. A projector may be useful for the cart too.
Re:Portable == stolen (Score:3, Informative)
LTSP (Score:4, Informative)
Use LTSP. Depending on the amount of clients, one or more servers and then many clients.
- LTSP clients are cheap, and they don't need client side maintenance except for hardware failures.
- Startup time for the computers is very small. With normal computers it can take 15 minutes to start up the computers, with LTSP it is a minute or less. This is important, because it is taken away from the school time.
- LTSP clients don't have hard drives, so they dont' break so easily.
- LTSP clients need less electricity, so you will save in electricity bills.
- You will be practically virus free
- Students can use any computer in any class (if you have them in several classes) and always get their own desktop.
- New clients are cheap and easy to add to the netnwork (unless you add so many that you need to add servers also, but that is not very hard either)
- Teachers can control the clients and easily e.g. disable them when they should not be used.
- Maintenance is cheap as pretty much only the server needs maintenance.
- Software licenses are free with Linux, OpenOffice.org etc.
- It has been used in schools before and total savings in costs have been 70% compared to Windows desktop computers. (Note this is only one study and it contains the expenses from transforming a Windows environment into Linux environment)
Re:This is a waste of time and money. (Score:5, Informative)
1) Teacher workstation in each room, with projector and an "Elmo."
2) Computer labs, with thin or fat clients, depending on your needs.
3) Laptop carts, so individual classes can use a set of laptops if needed.
This is the setup I would go for. We have a very similar setup in a private school of about 600 pupils. We have 4 large fixed labs (25+) which any department can use for individual lessons, including internet based classes such as ECDL and some learning support based material. Each department also has at least one mini-lab of up to 12 computers used for individual lessons.
The individual teacher workstations plus projector, active whiteboard and dvd/vhs player + audio are probably the most effective IT in the school. We also have them in the lecture halls, for larger presentations.
There is also one laptop cart for roving use, and we're likely to get another soon. Thin clients are fine for light-use areas, and thick clients for areas such as DT, MFL and IT. Don't forget you're going to need a beefy wifi infrastructure to support significant numbers of laptops; something like aruba, rather than a horde of crappy individual waps.
There are two main issues. Training, and support. Without sufficient ongoing IT in education training for the teaching staff, ANY resources you put in will be underused. Equally, you MUST have sufficient IT staff to keep the labs running and the teacher whiteboard machines operational in short order, in addition to your central systems and servers staff. Keep the machines locked down tight, and use central software deployment and a quick imaging system to keep downtime to a minimum, or thin clients for the same reasons.
Individual personal laptops/netbooks for the students will significantly increase your overheads in terms of both infrastructure and support. Most of our students have their own laptops for things like homework, but they're not integrated into lessons, given the likelyhood of them having viruses, dodgy software and the students using them to goof off in lessons. It can work for older students (6th form), but it will be a massive headache in actually trying to teach with non-school controlled laptops in the lower years.
Server wise, I can strongly recommend a virtualised solution (we use vmware esx + SAN, but xen + management tools such as citrix also works). Don't forget to build your switch fabric robust enough for growth, including easy vlan management and layer 3 routing where needed. vlan'ing your teacher pcs away from curriculum pcs, and wireless laptops vlan'd away from everything else is hopefully a no brainer.
Re:Create a portable lab (Score:5, Informative)
IT as a subject in British schools is deeply flawed.
You're not kidding. ICT (as they call it) as taught at GCSE level is an almost totally made up subject. If you went in to an exam with, say, just 20 years of experience in software development then you'd pass but you wouldn't get a top grade. To do that you need to learn the parallel world of the ICT examiner.
An example question - sorry I don't have the paper here so I can't quote it verbatim, but the essence is correct.
"Given a computer and an Internet connection, what else do you need to be able to access the web?"
First thoughts about this question tend to come up with all sorts of possible answers. You can be silly and say "a monitor", or "a mains lead for the computer", but then you settle down and try to think of sensible answers. Discarding, "an operating system" I settled on "a web browser".
Trouble is, it was a multiple choice question and that wasn't one of the options. I can't remember all the options now but I can tell you that the right answer (in the parallel world of GCSE ICT) was, "An ISP".
Huh! Hang on a minute - you said I'd already got an Internet connection. Apparently not - in the parallel world of the examiners you can have an Internet connection without having an ISP, and said Internet connection won't work until you identify an ISP.
It's a very silly subject, and teaches practically nothing about real IT. It's more a training course in how to use Microsoft Office.
Re:Create a portable lab (Score:2, Informative)
If you use a wireless solution designed for the environment you have it can work quite well. I have 300-400 active wireless clients daily. I just didn't use wi-fi equipment made for someone's house. I have one access point per 3-4 rooms but they also overlap coverage and load balancing. Putting 5-6 access points in one room would actually makes things far worse most likely since the clients would be constantly roaming and channel overlap would ruin speed.
Re:Create a portable lab (Score:5, Informative)
I wouldn't go 100% with *thin* clients, but some smarts would be quite adequate. Set up one or two superservers, and a whole bunch of VIA C7 boxen with cheap 17" LCD's and the barest hard drive. Just enough to boot up an X server and connect via XDMCP to t he superserver. That way you can set them up without any optical drives, and safely keep the USB disconnected. You don't really need to worry that the terminal is underpowered, as long as the network that it's connecting to has the bandwidth for XDMCP.... 100mbit (which every C7-board I've ever seen has onboard) is more than adequate... maybe connected into a gigabit or 10gbit switched connection to the server.... client to switch is 100mbit, switch to server is gigabit.
They run quiet, they run cold, and nobody in their right mind would steal them. :) They also use very little electricity, and are dirt cheap... you can put together a client similar to what I'm proposing for $200 per unit... That could be an enormous savings in implementing the system (just because the math is easy, and it's in the ballpark, I'll assume $500 per desktop/laptop)... even if you design around one server per 10 clients (realistically, any single server should be able to handle closer to 20-30 clients under load), that's still $3000 per server that you get to play with to keep the same budget. You can buy a lot of computer for $3000... my current superserver cost less than 1/3 of that, and it's got a quad core 2.5GHz processor, a 1.5TB RAID, and 8GB of RAM. (bought it in March 2008). Set up roaming profiles so that the servers can handle the same user connecting to potentially more than one server, and you're off to the races.
Re:LTSP (Score:3, Informative)
Certified clients and other hardware/support [disklessworkstations.com]
Re:Create a portable lab (Score:5, Informative)
I deal with actual thin net clients at work; they can be had even cheaper than those C7 boxes, and probably use even less energy. They use a small amount of flash instead of a HD for the OS and connection stuff. They don't even have fans.
With proper software/remote systems on the back end, you don't even need 'roaming profiles', the backend handles the details of transferring clients and even sessions between servers.
Depending on settings you can even use thumbrives with the sessions. While clients are available with CD drives; ours deliberately don't.
Re:Create a portable lab (Score:2, Informative)
Amen.
Every year my oldest's school has a careers evening. So last week, like the previous 2 years, I went along and talked to random passers-by about coding for living.
The first year I got asked a load of questions about GCSE/A-levels, and so last year read the ICT GCSE and A-level syllabuses. I think the screams could be heard down the road. The note on course projects in the A-level syllabus provoked the loudest. Something like 'You should use a common computer application for your project. Writing a program using a general-purpose programming language is outside the spirit of this course and will be marked accordingly.'.
There is some light on the horizon. Her school have dumped A-level ICT and now only offer A-level Computing. This is a very different kettle of fish. I was positively purring by the time the syllabus got onto having to learn an assembler...
Re:Create a portable lab (Score:3, Informative)
He really needs to look at K12LTSP [k12ltsp.org] and get on the mailing list [redhat.com] for this question. It has been asked quite a few times in the last seven years.
Re:This is a waste of time and money. (Score:3, Informative)
Bradford U.K. Building Schools for Future (BSF) (Score:3, Informative)
Active Whiteboards (Score:3, Informative)