Do you own or run a private school in the East Bay area?
Do you have old computers that run slowly?
Do you have students that are accessing inappropriate content on the Internet and using your classroom computers differently than they should be?
Recently, we were contacted by a private school, Palmer School for Boys and Girls, in Walnut Creek, California. They called us because they were having problems with some of their computer equipment.
Their computers in their computer lab were about five years old and would not support streaming educational games, videos or lessons. They had two computer servers that were hosting 25 of the virtual desktops that the students were using. The live streaming of all the graphics, sounds and other applications were overloading the servers. This caused the servers to slow down, lag and sometimes even crash. The teachers were unable to use this streaming educational content to teach their students.
When we submitted our proposal we included a different set up than they previously were running. Instead of having a server that would network all of the computers together, our proposal showed it would be much more cost-effective to give each seat in the classroom its own dedicated machine. This way, if any problems arise, they would be localized to the single computer, versus the entire server network, and the problem wouldn’t affect all the computers anymore. Also, each computer was fully capable of handling the streaming educational content.
A few notes about this project:
We installed the a Dell SonicWall unified threat management (UTM) device, which has features that allow you to blacklist categories of websites and specific URLs to keep the students from straying away from the lesson plans and onto websites where they shouldn’t be.
PalmerSchool for Boys & Girls also has NetSupport School Classroom Manager, which gives the teacher absolute access to any of the students’ computers with a click of a button. They are able to observe all on-screen activity, are alerted when certain keywords are punched in, and can revoke access instantly from any student.
Written by: Cantrell’s Computer Sales & Service
