District Administration - October 2011 - (Page 98)

CIO CONTINUED District How Much Computing Power Do You Need? At the Alvarado Independent School District, fourth- through eighth-graders get laptops, but high school students are expected to bring their own devices. oﬀ servers and use the Web. What I want to do is make it possible for my technology to support the teachers more, rather than have them worrying about how this server behaves or that server behaves.” Royal (Texas) Independent School District is piloting a plan to purchase older Dell computers through CDI Computers, a reseller based in Ontario, Canada, to see if the cloud means that the latest generation of machines is no longer a necessity. Royal ISD ﬁred up about 100 refurbished units at the start of the school year purchased for as low as $100, where a new machine costs $700, says Corey Kelly, Royal’s director of technology. e district is hoping to expand that idea to all 1,200 of its units in ﬁve schools, Kelly adds. “I’d like to have all the computers in the district on the cloud,” he says. “What we want to do is get older Dell systems and … use them basically as a thin client. We don’t have all the money to jump in head ﬁrst.” Gal Pikar, director of marketing for CDI, says he doesn’t see many schools using or adopting refurbished computers for the cloud just yet. “We’re perfectly positioned for when they do,” he says. For now, Pikar adds, “they’re keeping the older machines even longer because everything they’re doing is Web based.” Limitations of the Cloud e cloud isn’t the answer to everything, and districts do need to keep some oldschool computing horsepower, say tech companies and CIOs. Schools still need to have computational horsepower for memory-intensive functions like science experiments and music composition, Evans says. “It’s not an either-or proposition,” he explains. “We haven’t gotten to a place where we’re going to throw away all of our computational power.” 25,000 students, Hall County Public Schools has kept career technology classes like architecture and engineering out of the cloud mainly because content providers haven’t made the jump themselves, Turpin says. “We look forward to that happening,” he adds. Similarly, Alvarado ISD has kept video editing and computer-aided design oﬀ the cloud. “ ose kinds of things aren’t suited to that type of environment,” Berger “The ﬁrst time we were required to store data on a centralized server, it scared us to death.” —Bob Moore, director of global education, Dell Crawford notes that art, design and engineering applications often require power on-site. In those instances, districts “have given students powerful laptops and are using applications for those courses on the hard drive locally,” she says. Casap points to video editing as another area that needs on-site power. “Students taking video cameras and going out and shooting gigs and gigs and gigs of video will need processing power on the machine to do that editing,” he says, adding, “I’m not sure how far we are from having cloud-based ﬁlm editing.” A district with 33 K12 schools and says. “We keep those workhorses on the machines themselves.” But Moore at Dell believes the biggest barrier to the move to the cloud isn’t technological, but cultural. “It’s a shifting of mindset: Where do we put our investments?” he says. “ e ﬁrst time we were required to store data on a centralized server, it scared us to death. e network might go down, and we might not have access. We need to cut the cord, so to speak. We need to be willing to rely on the next technology.” DA Ed Finkel is a freelance write in Evanston, Ill. )# xeH nI ( sroloC Don’t miss out on Disney’s Planet Challenge. See page 15. resaet ni sraeppa ehs sA 0572C3 9B7861 3F0DA9 B59C1D 000000 98 October 2011 District Administration

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - October 2011

District Administration - October 2011
Contents
From the Editor
Letters
News Update
Transportation Update
District Profile
Administrator Profile
Building a Blended Learning Program
How Are Science Fairs Fairing?
A New Age for Algebra
Early College High Schools
Changing of the Guard in Florida
CIO News
How Much Computing Power Do You Need?
An Unconventional Approach to 1:1
New Books
Problem/ Solution
Research Center
Product Focus
New Products
Professional Opinion
Going Mobile
Online Edge

District Administration - October 2011