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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."
The old lab model is dead. Take your 20-30 computers, make them laptops, and available for any classroom use the teachers need. If demands becomes such that you can't meet demand, then you buy more. Add wireless throughout the place, and you should be set.
I'm UK taxpayer. This question highlights what I think is an endemic problem with the UK teaching system, and frankly the whole of the civil service:
This sort of thing shouldn't even be up for debate.
Developing this sort of infrastructure on a school-by-school basis is incredibly stupid. There should have been a central government review of the options prior to the latest run of school building, and a proper IT spending policy should have been worked out then. Having the decision made by the headteacher and a couple of staff (only one or two of whom are likely to be remotely qualified to understand all the options) means one school ends up with a much better or worse IT system than another. That is plain wrong. It's not fair on the kids.
To answer the question, for the love of God find out how the other schools near you have faired with their systems and copy the best one. Do not do go it alone (or alone with lots of Slashdotters).
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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.
We used to use our textbooks as makeshift sleds... I'd recommend NOT giving every student a laptop to take home!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Tell me why throwing computers at the students will educate them "better" than having a professor standing at the front of the room moving a magnet along a glowing glass tube filled with argon showing them how the magnetic field "collapses" the light into a ribbon, with the students first entranced and then eagerly scribbling notes. And then in the next class having the students find the flaw in a mathematical proof covering two blackboards which "proves" that 2+2=5.
Stop thinking about computers & start thinking of the students.
I'm all for computers, having started programming back in '77 when a highcool math teacher took the private initiative to take some of us to an after school adult education class to learn programming, then building my own NASCOM-1 Z-80 kit in '78, and so on... I've been a professional programmer for over 25 years, and practically live on the computer at home doing hobbyist programming... So, I couldn't be a stronger advocate for the use and fun of using computers...
That all said, I'd have to go with the traditional computer lab model, preferably not just as a resource for homework research etc, but as a place for schedules hands-on computer lessons as part of the curriculum whether it be programming or even general computer use. I don't really see a useful place for computers in the classroom as part of other lessons, as it seems it would only be a distraction. The "enriched interactive multimedia experience" story-line may sound good at some level, but all it's really going to mean is that time that could have been spent covering and explaining core lesson material is instead spent faffing around with computers, watching videos, dealign with computer probolems etc.
If you want to have some cross-over between computer/programming classes and other lessons, then why not just encourage use of the internet as a research tool for homework assignments, maybe accept (or occasionally require) printed assignments as well as hand writen ones. This sort of approach would give the kids a useful introduction to preactical use of computers, an exposure to programming, but not do so at the expense of turning the core curruculum into am extended multimedia click-fest, and taking attention away from the teacher.
If you do take the opposite approach and bring computers into the classroom, then consider the scale of effort requires to develop computer based courses that are the equal of the textbook based material you currently teach. This sounds more like a mult-year national level effort, rather than something that a few teachers are going to be able to hack together in your own school.
I'd also echo what another poster wrote - don't go it alone! Reseach how other schools are using computers and what actually WORKS. Which schools have seen grades increase rather than decrease as a result of use of computers, and how does that correlate to the way they are using them?
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.
I think a lot of this is snakeoil. If it isn't immediately clear what advantage the computer will bring to the lesson, don't use the computer. There are cases when it is clear that the computer brings a lot of positives, but it isn't all cases by a longshot.
Computers can eat up class time with distractions and technical problems. And digital work lacks tangibility. Students respond better to paper homework with actual scores than to digital assignments with scores appearing on some webpage.
I know that these problems may be solvable in the future, but they aren't solved now.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
No matter what setup you choose, don't forget the most important ingredient: Training. Lots of it. Ongoing. Study after study has shown that technology only gets truly integrated into the classroom if both teachers and administrators get ongoing, regular professional development around both using it and working it into the curriculum. Not just one session before the start of the school year - at least a couple of years' worth of regular sessions to help them figure out how to use it in the lessons they're teaching. Without that, whatever you get will just go to waste.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
I do IT for a medical practice. What we ended up with was a central server running Fedora and LTS, with thin clients in each of the exam rooms and in the doctor's office.
This had all the benefits of getting the records available in each room without having to go through individual updates. There are still fat clients/full workstations in the office, but those are primarily for the other work--office manager, accounting, etc.
since each grade level is different (different lessons, different requirements), I would suggest having a server either for each classroom, grade level, or department. For example, your math classes would need different software (and access) than your English class. You could even set up your foreign-language classes to have the locale set to the language they teach--the kids would have to learn French, Spanish, Russian, etc to use the computers...and the casual contact with that language would reinforce the lessons.
True, you would lose some of the benefits of "one admin to rule them all," but the software and changes would be compartmentalized--and the Computer instructors could even have more free reign to fix (or damage) their systems as they see fit.
Never confuse movement with action. --Hemingway
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. 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).
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.
Beyond IT uses for the computers, I recommend the following rather than their computer simulations:
Link is a shock site.
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)
The major reason computer technology deployments for K-12 education (in the US at least..)and failed to deliver on it's promises while becoming a black hole of spending in the 90s and early 2000's, is that the approach was similar to the one you describe here.
Back then, we gave teachers and administrators the latest, greatest technology and expected them to figure out how to use it in order to make instruction better. Some teachers did just that, but they were few and far between. These early adopters created pockets of technology and inconsistency/inequality of instruction across the school landscape. In the worst cases, the technology sat gathering dust in the classroom closet.
Several years ago I participated in a large-scale Gates Foundation grant to study various models of instruction and gather measurable data about those models. ( Before you jump up-and-down about Micro$oft dealing Windows to our kids, you should know that of the 9 million in grant funding, only 10% could be spent on technology... the majority had to be used to study the instructional outcomes of the various school models.)
As the result of that study we found a number of proven technologies and techniques that helped to enhance the learning experience.
1) Before you buy a single piece of Tek, you need an instructional technology plan that will show how the equipment and software that you choose will create the instructional outcomes you want. Results MUST be measurable so that you can share them with the public (partial to justify the expense...) and instructional staff so that you can build and refine your techniques. The plan should be at least 3 years in depth and be flexible enough to absorb changes in administration and instructional staff. If you do not do this first, all the tek in the world wont help you educate kids.
2) Develop a support plan and a refresh cycle. This is the IT side of the house. You plan should include long term training both for new staff and a constant refreshers for existing staff. You want admin computing (see #3 below ) to be a no-brainier so you can concentrate your resources on the instructional side of the house.
3) Deploy a standardized technology to instructors and administrators in order to cover the rote administrative tasks like grading, email, communication, Internet research, and word processing. Thin client works very well for this. It's robust and consistent.
4) No Classroom Computers in Grades K-3: Children at these ages need to focus on interpersonal and cognitive skills. Computer Technology at this level has been shown in many studies to decrease the learning process.
5) Deploy Smartboards, LCD Projectors, a Presentation PC with an attached "Elmo", and classroom sound amplification system (such as the "FrontRow" product). Of all this equipment, the piece that will make the most difference is the amplification system. This technology has been proven time and time again to increase student learning/comprehension and at the same time, reduce teacher absenteeism.
6) Consider learning labs and mobile devices such as tablets and laptop carts, if they fit into your instructional technology and support plans and maximize your available resources.
And just some tips from my own years of experience in edTek:
-Break the low voltage data infrastructure wiring out from the general contractor who is building your new school. Generals don't understand the big-picture of data. Be sure that the IT staff is involved in the deployment and design of your plant.
-Don't skimp on power outlets and data jacks!
-Laptop carts can be very heavy when fully loaded. If you use them, go with more small ones with fewer laptops.
-If you engage a consultant(s) to oversee your tek deployment, be sure they have lots of experience with school technology. Business folks often don't understand the differences that exist between the private sector and education.
Don't fret over the Windows/Mac/Linux issue for instruction. If your teachers are edu
I work for a school district in the US and the bang for your money is Active Whiteboards and software such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activstudio. It was incredible how this technology really enabled better teaching and interactions with the kids. The next thing is mobile labs of laptops. However, these do require a good wireless support network. ski