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Going on a Desktop Diet
...Reductions in state aid to cities and towns. Level funding to education from cities and towns. Increasing mandates. Class sizes pushed to capacity and beyond, positions eliminated, programs cut back. These are some of the pressures many educators are wrestling with as we maneuver to not only meet current and future demands, but in some cases, to actually survive...
[Read entire article at Learning & Leading with Technology Magazine]
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HP Thin Clients Deliver Affordable Classroom Computing
....The Pawtucket School Department faces the same challenges as schools nationwide: reduced funding, increasing state and local mandates, and growing class sizes. Together, they're forcing cutbacks in every department and program. The technology department is no exception. And it was facing a crisis even without those other challenges. Pawtucket School's IT Team implemented - server-client computing utilizing HP thin clients - and the dramatic turnaround that has resulted....
[Read the entire Case Study at HP]
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From Virtual Desktops to the Cloud
.....Giving users the ability to work anywhere, anytime, from any device was one of the drivers that led Michael St. Jean to skip client virtualization altogether, moving ahead with the district's plan to incorporate thin clients and the cloud. St. Jean, director of technology for the 16-school Pawtucket School Department in Rhode Island, started the journey nearly a decade ago by buying the first of what would become 2,200 HP thin clients and dozens of virtualized Remote Desktop Servers running Microsoft Windows Server.....
"Our goals are portability and mobility for our users, so we have developed a system where students, teachers and administrators can access what they need from wherever they happen to be through thin clients that are low-cost and low-energy," St. Jean explains.
[ Read the entire article at EDTech Magazine ]
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Open Source Software: A Budget Cutter's Ally?
....Michael St. Jean, director of technology for the Pawtucket (R.I.) School Department and an advocate of FOSS , says that the recession is causing him to search for additional FOSS applications that can work in his district. "We're a financially challenged district. Open source fills the gap where we can't afford a commercial product," he explains...
....Still, the Pawtucket district doesn't use as much FOSS as St. Jean believes it could. He identifies two reasons why: First, teachers have been reluctant to give up commercial software applications they are comfortable with; second, he and his small tech team can't provide the same level of support as a large software vendor.....
[ Read the entire article at Distrcit Administration Magazine ]
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A Savings Twofer
...The move to virtualization is but the latest in a series of technology-driven conservationist steps undertaken at the Pawtucket School Department in Rhode Island. The district started at the desktop, replacing classroom computers with thin clients, which-- along with accompanying flat-panel monitors-- cost only about $200 each and reduced power consumption from 100 watts per machine down to about 5 watts per machine, says Michael St. Jean, Pawtucket's director of technology...
[Read the entire article at THE Journal]
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The Case for Mobile Thin Clients: IT departments save money and increase security with these new devices
...The Pawtucket School Department in Rhode Island has had a thin-client environment for the past seven years. It started by retrofitting aging PCs and installing Linux-based thin-client software, says Technology Director Michael St. Jean. Now, the district runs some 2,000 dedicated thin clients. Besides stationary classroom and computer-lab thin clients, the district operates about 100 notebook-size units, such as the HP 4410t, as well as a few hundred mobile carts with desktop thin clients and wireless bridges mounted to them. Instructors can wheel the carts into classrooms and set up ad hoc computer labs...
[ Read the entire article at EDTech Magazine ] |
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Pawtucket School District: A Virtual Iron Success Story
...As they simplified the desktop, they soon found that they needed to simplify the server environment as well. This lead to an exploration of the use of virtual processing software in general and virtual machine software in specific to consolidate the workloads onto a smaller number of servers...
[Read the entire article at ZDNet]
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SMALL INVESTMENT 'ALLOWS SCHOOLS TO GROW'
...A minimal initial investment in Virtual Iron's solutions has allowed one school administrator to expand its network as required. The company explains that the Pawtucket School Department in Rhode Island services 17 schools in the region but is limited in terms of its budgetary allocation for IT upgrades. But by adopting the Virtual Iron software, the department was able to virtualise its data network for less than the cost would have been with some competitors after carrying out a free trial of the product...
[Read the rest of the article at Zycko UK]
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