SchoolTechTools.com

Every summer since we started our laptop program, my department spends a week or two (or has summer help) re-imaging the returning student computers. We have done this because the Windows machines have been so junked up and needed to be cleaned up. We simply don’t have that problem with the MacBooks. We will need to run software updates, and maybe install a couple applications, but we can use ARF for that.

That being said, we still may re-image them simply because we are making some changes to our master image. The point is, we don’t NEED to re-image them.

Well we are 6 weeks into the 2009-2010 school year, and our first year of 1 to 1 with Apple MacBook laptops. That’s right, we switched our program to Apple this year. Last school year we surveyed the students, as well as potential students, and decided to conduct a trial year with Apple. So far, so good. We’ve had no virus issues on Mac, and Apple’s management tools are great! I think that Apple’s Remote Desktop program is quite possibly the greatest management program ever written, especially for the cost.

We have installed Windows XP on the MacBooks inside Sun’s VirtualBox software. Academic institutions qualify for their Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL). We considered using BootCamp, but by using virtualization the students don’t have to reboot their computer in order to change operating systems.

The hardware is not as great as we expected it to be. We had more out of the box problems than we had with HP or Toshiba laptops. Once the initial problems have been fixed, they have been very reliable — so far.

Students and staff have been asking what we are going to do for next year. It’s a little early to say with 100% certainty, but we aren’t ruling out anything. We have to look at the economy, our budget, and the fact that we can purchase netbooks for a fraction of the price we spent on previous notebooks. Ubuntu Linux on netbooks looks like a great solution. We’ll see what the future brings.

Here is a script that I have been using for a couple of years now to create hundreds or thousands of users from an Excel spreadsheet.

CreateUsers.txt

Spreadsheet for add user script

We have needed to make some long overdue upgrades to our infrastructure. We have 9 servers that are due to be retired/replaced at the end of this school year, and our wireless network needed an overhaul.

We recently purchased a Trapeze Networks MX-200 and MP-422A access points. So far they are working great! It’s nice to finally have a controller for the APs so that changes can be made centrally, and not on each AP. I’ll keep you up to date on it’s performance.

As for the servers, we selected the IBM BladeCenter, 4 blades, and VMWare. We should begin that installation in a couple of weeks once I get the correct power into the datacenter. I also have to make some room in the rack to handle the chassis. I can’t wait to dive head first into the world of virtualization!

AIt’s the time of year when we start shopping for laptops for the next school year. For the 2008-2009 school year we selected the Toshiba Tecra A8 laptop. However, the students haven’t been very happy with it because of the weight. The 15.4” WXGA screen makes for a large, heavy laptop – can’t say I blame them. Apparently many of the laptop companies have decided that 15.4” wide screens are the way to go, and are making them the most affordable units in their line. A few years ago a 14” screen was the de facto standard, now it’s a premium product that companies like to sell as an “upgrade” to their now standard 15.4” wide screen. We decided that Toshiba’s brand new Satellite Pro U400 which has a 13.3” wide screen (just like a MacBook) was the unit to buy this year. Unfortunately by the time we added a 3-year warranty the cost was $1150+ per unit. That’s pretty hard to swallow since we bought a Tecra A8 last year with a 3-year warranty for $800 each. We have been told we got the “buy of the century” on the Tecras. I have a sneaking suspicion that Toshiba doesn’t manufacture these new Satellite Pro U400 units, they have someone else OEM them. The reason I say this is because they wouldn’t deal at all on price. If we selected a Tecra, they were willing to negotiate on price.

So we started shopping for a new vendor, I hate doing this. I hate the fact that we have to shop for a new unit each year, but since we only have our students (and laptops) for 2 years, it doesn’t make sense to spend $1100+ per laptop. We gave some very serious consideration to Apple, but we just couldn’t make it happen. With all of the software we use in our labs, we need to run Windows. Most of the programs have a Mac equivelant, but the big one that doesn’t is AutoCAD. We have over 100 students taking classes that use AutoCAD, and that means running BootCamp and purchasing a $140 OEM copy of Windows XP or Vista for them. Financially it doesn’t make sense for us. We would have to transition the entire network over to Mac, but that would take a few years.

We looked at the Acer TravelMate series of notebooks. These laptops appear to be built very well. The only problem is that we can’t find many schools using Acer laptops, and the service kind of scares me. There are no Acer service centers, everything is depot.

We ended up purchasing a HP nc4400 laptop that has a 12” screen, and an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0Ghz processor. This has been a very speedy unit in our testing, and the students love the fact that it is only 4 pounds. Furthermore, it boasts a 5.5 hour battery. The students should be able to use the laptop most of the school day.

Our next major decision, what laptop bags to buy.

Last month while at the eTech Technology Conference I was involved in a discussion about eBooks and laptop programs. The topic came up about loading eBooks onto the student laptops, and doing away with the traditional hardback textbooks. So far we have only heard promises from book publishers, and it seems that they really don’t want to make the shift away from those traditional textbooks. In speaking with our students, the laptops are heavy enough, and they really don’t want to add several books to what they are carrying around. The laptop is a great platform to load eBooks onto, but there just aren’t very many of them out there.

The topic came up again on an e-mail listserv that I participate in, and I spoke out again about publishers not willing to shift to eBooks. We have enough talented teachers in the State of Ohio to write the textbooks that could be used statewide and correlated to the Ohio Academic Content Standards. I offered to build and host a site where this content could be housed – for free. I’m working on creating a wiki that can be the home of this content. This content really shouldn’t be limited to Ohio, in fact it really shouldn’t be limited at all. I really like what MIT (and others) is doing with their OpenCourseWare project, and would like to create a similar project for K-12 schools. Please stay tuned for more information about the eBook website.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted to the blog, we’ve been very busy getting ready for school to start. On August 22, 2007 we officially began year 3 of our laptop program. We’ve learned a lot since we started the program, and it shows this year.  We decided to distribute the laptops in the labs during our orientation nights. Last year we distributed the laptops during orientation night, but had only one central location. I had the Technology Department setup in our IT lab where the student-run helpdesk will be located. We figured this way the we could get students used to go to the helpdesk rather than the Technology department.

We implemented Software Restriction Policies through AD Group Policy in an effort to control the applications that students are using during school hours. We wanted to lock-down the laptops during school hours, but allow students to play games and communicate with their friends when not in school. We were able to accomplish this by following some recommendations from Lee Tilley (Chamanade School). Lee had suggested creating a second user account in which students could login to their PC with admin rights. Once we got some group policy issues worked out, things started working very nicely.

The problems that we are still battling are as follows:
Can’t get students to leave the laptops in the bags – they take laptop out while at home
Students are putting binders and notebooks between the screen and back of laptop bag
Students are using school e-mail system as an IM tool.

If you have any suggestions for how to solve my 3 problems listed above, please let me know.

I recently returned from a road trip to St. Louis, MO where I was visiting two schools that have been doing 1 to 1 for quite some time now. While in St. Louis, I visited Lee Tilley of Chaminade College Prepatory School, and Alex Inman of The Whitfield School. Both of them were able to share a great deal of knowledge, and really made my trip worthwhile. It is interesting to see how different laptop programs are setup, and how they compare with our program. Much of what we do is similar, but each program has little things that differentiate it from others. For example, all three of us have been using Lenovo ThinkPads (we recently switched to the Toshiba Tecra A8). One school uses an alway-on laptop bag, whereas the other school uses a top loading messenger bag.

Some of the things that we will be looking into for next year are:

• Secure DHCP server to prevent unauthorized systems
• Using Group Policy Software Restriction Policies to white-list applications that students can run
• Examview software for teachers who administer electronic exams
• Partition hard drives into C: (OS and Programs) and D: (student data)
• Charge students for missing keys on keyboards ($1 per key and more than 5 keys means the student buys a new keyboard)

These are just a few things we are looking at, and will likely change quite a few things, especially Professional Development and Technology Integration. Thank you both for your time and expertise!

If you read my last post, you would know that we were considering opening up sites such as MySpace because of the positive potential that they have. However after working with one of our labs, we have decided to continue blocking MySpace at this time. One of the students had several references to illegal drug use, and another student had a video of a stripper on his page. We have also decided to start looking into a different web filtering solution for next school year. We are looking at the Corporate Guardian product from Smoothwall (www.smoothwall.net). This product utilizes several open-source products such as Squid, SquidGuard, and DansGuardian. However this product also includes NTLM authentication and support. We found the product to be very thorough, and well priced. Our sales rep was able to get us a demo that will last for 60 days, therefore we can test it for the remainder of our school year. I’ll keep you updated.

After listening to a few speakers lately (Will Richardson and Alan November) we are considering unblocking MySpace.com as well as a significant number of websites that fall into chat or discussion forum categories. We have identified a significant number of students who are continuing to find ways around our filtering system in order to get to MySpace.com. This is a fight that we are never going to win, we need to educate the students about what websites are appropriate for school and which ones are not. This past Friday I met with our Student Advisory Council and asked about the fascintion with MySpace and other sites that are similar. The answer I got was that it’s an environment in which they can customize every inch of their space, and they have fun doing it. They are actually learning HTML code while doing so (so I guess you could say it’s educational). The students felt that if we unblocked it, there would be a mad rush of students flocking to MySpace.com in order to update their profile and check their messages. The feeling was that the novelty would wear off in a week or two, and everything would be back to normal.  Right now the students are searching the web trying to find anonymizing proxy servers so they can bypass our filter. The students have all day long to find a way out, and they admitted that it’s kind of a rush when they find a way. I only have a limited amount of time to stay ahead of the students, of course they are going to win.

So, over the next few weeks we may be conducing an experiment. We will go through and unblock most websites (except sites that absolutely must be blocked) to see what happens. I would anticipate that our bandwidth utilization hits 100% for the first few days. Hopefully the novelty wears off quickly and life gets back to normal. It would be nice to find a teacher who is willing to setup their own MySpace page and post school-appropriate content out there. Maybe they could post their classroom activities out there for students who are out sick. I’ll keep you posted…