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Best IT Solution For a Brand-New School?
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."
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.