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."
Tablet Cart, plz (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't have as much faith in a computer for every student, in every class.
If it's anything like my college courses in the states, a lot of time might need to be devoted to keeping students on task, instead of checking social networking sites during class. Maybe things are different in Britain, though.
In my High School we had a rolling cart with 30 laptops inside it, a central charging supply, a printer and a wireless network. This was maybe the best idea our IT department ever had because when the computers were necessary they could come to the classroom where they were needed without the logistics of moving a couple of dozen teenagers. When they're not needed, they can be put in buffer or sent to where they are. The downtime you'd normally see of computers in class is not wasted and the budget is more effectively applied to all of the classrooms. It sounds like my school was a lot smaller than the one you're serving at, so maybe a lot more carts are needed than just the one, of course.
Sunray... (Score:3, Interesting)
Lowest on going cost over all. And one admin to rule them all.
Re:This is a waste of time and money. (Score:5, Interesting)
That being said, your suggestion at looking at other school districts and finding out what has worked for them is a great idea. Our school recently put in "Elmos," which are mounted digital cameras for projectors which were put into each room.
Most of my teachers started using them, and they saved a lot of time, because they could show the class the pice of paper, and not have to look/get a transparency of the paper. It also gives them more options as far as showing short clips, or powerpoints, or stuff like that.
So review:
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.
The teaching method is the key (Score:3, Interesting)
USB drives as an option (Score:3, Interesting)
A relatively new option that should be looked at is providing each student with their own USB drive, at a cost of 10USD to 100USD each, depending on whether flash or spinning, and size. Load these with a standard image of portable FOSS software (assuming you are using Windows, look at the Portable Apps web site [portableapps.com]. There will be room enough for a full suite of portable applications plus storage for all text a student might author in the course of year. Plus, with the larger drives, enough room for libraries of whatever. Be worth the while to check what's now available through the Open CourseWare initiatives of MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and a host of other institutions. Some of it may be appropriate to the students in question, and you can't beat the price or accessibility.
A key to this approach is loading a portable image of Firefox that is preconfigured with the bookmarks and other features the school wants the students to have access to.
This showed a great deal of promise in an adult ed "Preparation For The WorkPlace" environment I was associated with until last July. The software was well received by students, especially Firefox with its bookmarks. They got very comfortable using it. These were on 1 GB thumb drives, which was more than adequate in size.
The portable OpenOffice.org component was not well received by those teachers who were already very defensive about their minimalist skill level with Microsoft Office, but that kind of resistance (of teachers being required to learn new software) is a separate issue that has to be faced no matter how software in the schools is updated.
I work with Asus EEEs in UK school (Score:4, Interesting)
I am working with Asus EEE PCs in a Milton Keynes school -I am at the Open University and we are part of the Personal Inquiry project [pi-project.ac.uk]. Happy to chat offline if you'd like to hear about our experiences.
Main issues: variable levels of student computer literacy, support and management of laptops, making sure the devices transparently connect to the school network, other school computers on shared drives and home networks, ethical issues (schools and homes having different policies on what students can access), students using laptops as tool to play with instead of working (i.e. using the games/distraction software and functionalities).
Thin Client is great (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's a scenario for you, that will cater to your needs:
Buy the most power machine money can buy - up to about £3000 in terms of CPU power, lots of RAM, and every storage slot filled with high capacity storage - stick with SATA if available, otherwise SAS disks will do.
Then, go to Viglen, and buy their crappy little £79 PCs that go on the back of the monitor with a VESA mount. They're shockingly underpowered - 400MHz, but they make fantastic thin clients.
You can run about 100 think clients on such a system, and it'll work really nicely.
However, it being a school - there's no chance it'll take off, and you'll be stuck with the same rubbish everyone else is.
As an IT professional, I actually am against computers in schools. Typing is all well and good, but kids these days already know Google and Word, anything they actually need for modern business is pretty much self-taught or taught at their first place of employment.
Computers are the bane of the modern UK school system.
Re:This is a waste of time and money. (Score:4, Interesting)
Iain here (OP), posting as AC.
Just to clarify, agree or not, one of the points of City Academies was to provide certain schools with the freedom to explore innovative solutions that may well be rolled out nationwide. As such we have different restrictions and resources to other local schools (which by the way are a mix of tablet only, thin client, fat client and mixed solutions).
Personally I disgree with prescribed solution for all schools as each school has very specific needs, besides this was not the point of the question as I obviously have no input into Government policy (interesting topic, just not the one I wanted to raise).
I'd also like to clarify that while the writeup does show my inclination to an all techology based system, it is my awareness of my personal bias that prompted me to submit this story. Taken as a whole /. has much wider and deeper experience and knowledge than I could hope to have myself, and I wanted people that disagree with me to help me clarify my thinking.
Thanks to all respondents. I really appreciate all opinions.
Re:The teaching method is the key (Score:3, Interesting)
On another note, getting laptops for every classroom is a huge waste of money. My English classroom in Junior High had its own laptops, and we used them maybe twice. Tablets would be interesting, but it would take far too much effort for little if any return if you got them.
The Science of Education (Score:3, Interesting)
You know, this is one of those areas where I wish educational systems would take a more scientific approach to these types of problems. It's pretty much the same way here in the U.S.
There seems to be little 'method' to the ways we try to figure out the 'best' ways to integrate IT into education.
It seems to me that in situations like this, schools could benefit from systematically applying the scientific method - Observations, Hypothesis, Prediction, Experiment, Analysis. (Repeat as necessary.)
Start building a *theory* of education and IT, and then make your school IT decisions and budgets based upon the body of theory thus developed.
So, this means that you gather lots of ideas from all sorts of people (everyone from Education Ph.Ds, down to teachers and IT staff at the schools, even to interested members of the public who have ideas) about how IT could be better implemented in education, and start using a small number of schools as experimental test beds (and other schools as 'control data' for the experiments).
These experiments should be, first, submitted to and approved by some national 'school board', or at least something like a group of professors at a University education department, who are tasked with tracking and eventually reporting on the results. From the results, this 'school board', or university task force, or whoever is responsible, can start creating recommendations and best practices.
Projectors in the classrooms (Score:2, Interesting)
A new school went up in my area. They installed a projector mounted to the ceiling of every classroom, with wiring run through the wall to the teacher's computer, with additional hookups for elmos, DVD players, etc. That's a pretty nifty solution.
At my school, there's a limited number of projector carts available, and an even smaller number of carts with their own computer or an elmo included. If a teacher planned a lesson around certain tools and suddenly the cart they need isn't available, they are out of luck. Some teachers end up purchasing their own equipment because they can't reliably get a hold of the school's. You should see some of the hack jobs that are done just to get a projector running - video cables suspended across pathways to a projector pointing at an angle to a wall, stuff like that.
Re:Portable == stolen (Score:3, Interesting)
I would say, when studying math for the sake of math, it would certainly be useful to ban computers for much of the curriculum -- even calculators aren't needed. Then, when they start using them, they'll at least have a sense of when the computer is wrong.
Amen, brother.
For writing, however, I don't see a significant advantage to not providing a computer. All the pen does is make your hand cramp...
I found that manual note taking (even though I am left-handed, and so smeared ink) ingrained the information in my brain better than listening.
Word processors, though, are invaluable for drafting and writing "papers". Typewriters really suck!
And for science, I would say, you already have to do it by hand in math, a computer would be useful in science, if it means you get to cover more ground, faster. But I'm not sure.
All you need is a calculator. The manual act of plotting graphs (even when the point are generated by calculator) seemed to reinforce things for me.
Re:Portable == stolen (Score:3, Interesting)
I found that manual note taking (even though I am left-handed, and so smeared ink) ingrained the information in my brain better than listening.
I find it depends how I do it.
Mental mapping can be useful in some techniques, but I constantly found myself wishing I had a software tool to do it for me.
When things are, in fact, best represented as a stream of text, I find it's much easier if I can type that quickly and get back to actually listening.
But, YMMV.
All you need is a calculator. The manual act of plotting graphs (even when the point are generated by calculator) seemed to reinforce things for me.
I found it more useful when whole graphs could be generated quickly, and then I could ask questions like, what would it mean if I changed this value? What would have to change for the graph to look like this?
Yes, calculus can solve those, but actually, probably the most valuable precalculus tool was Excel -- they made us generate a few tables, and look for a pattern, and only once we'd done it that way were we allowed to use that formula.
Re:I've got a wad of money!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
An example: My college physics classes (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the Physics department at my university has done a good job of applying this principle. They used an online homework platform for most of the assignments for the General Physics classes I had to take as part of my engineering program. Now the thing about homework is, you don't really learn much from problems which you solved wrong, and then only learned you solved them wrong when they are marked incorrect by your teacher (which is the 'traditional' method). Usually, in such a traditional method, the teacher will hopefully spend some time in class going over problems students got wrong, so they could at least see the correct way to solve the problem, but it's still not as good a learning experience as when you figure out how to do it yourself.
With this online homework platform, students got up to 5 chances to get the solution correct. That is, if you solved the problem, inputted your answer in the website, and your answer was not correct, it would notify you the answer was not correct (but would not tell you what the right answer is), and give you a chance to try again. I personally found this to be an excellent teaching tool - simply knowing that my answer was not right gave me the chance to go back and look at the problem, and try to figure out where my mistake was. Almost all of the time, I could figure out my mistake, and correct it within 1 or 2 tries - something I never had the opportunity to do in classes I took earlier in my academic career. I truly believe that having those additional chances to correct my own mistakes helped me to learn the material better.
This is one example of something that is not easy to do without computers, but quite easy to do with computers.