District Administration - October 2011 - (Page 94)

How Much Computing Power Do You Need? ContInuEd cio District judging because the student can collaborate with the teacher—the teacher can go into the document and provide guidance and leave hints.” As such, cloud-based applications strengthen the learning process through building skills like communication, collaboration, risk-taking and analysis, Casap says. “Students need to learn those skills, on top of content,” he says. The cloud gives students and teachers the ability to access applications and data on multiple types of devices, including smartphones and tablets, and they can do most anything, including photo editing through services such as Flickr, Moore says. “There aren’t too many things today that if you are determined, you couldn’t do out of the cloud,” he says. “A few years ago, we wouldn’t have thought [photo editing] possible. It really has fundamentally Students at the Alvarado (Texas) Independent School District use netbooks in class. They build their own work portfolios in the cloud and save other data that would have been housed on servers or desktop machines in the past. changed the notion of the kind of device and the horsepower that device needs.” Moore adds that schools must be willing to make the adequate bandwidth investment. “If that infrastructure doesn’t So how much computing power do schools still need to have on site? That’s changing all the time, so it’s hard to pin down a specific figure until one talks to a district’s leaders about what they’re “I’m not going to be put down in history as the person who said, ‘You only need 640 kilobytes of memory.’ ” —Cameron Evans, chief technology officer for education, Microsoft exist or isn’t very good, all bets are off,” he says. “But if the cloud infrastructure is in place, then the type of device students use becomes less significant. Some of the tablets today have more computing power, more memory, than full-featured notebooks or desktops just a few short years ago.” hoping to do with their technology, says Cameron Evans, chief technology officer for education at Microsoft. “We could set an arbitrary benchmark today, but those things are doubling in capacity on a logarithmic scale every 18 months,” Evans says. Can Refurbished Computers Do the Job? Sitting on 40 acreS of rolling hillS in hillSBoro, Mo., about 50 miles southwest of St. louis, is the grandview r-ii School District, which has 850 K12 students and about 120 staff members. nearly 100 percent of the computers operate in the cloud. Kathy Bellew, the district’s technology coordinator, likes to say she is the IT department, as she is the lone tech person operating and maintaining servers and equipment. While administrative staff members are still using Microsoft Office, academic and student work is all in the cloud, a shift that began in 2005 with the student information system. An Internet connection and a decent processor is all that’s needed, Bellew says. “I don’t have to do installations on machines; I don’t have to maintain servers; I don’t have expensive equipment [to install and maintain],” she explains. This saves her time, money, personnel and aggravation. Even the yearbook content and creation is done in the cloud. as for computer power, the grandview district has about 100 sixyear-old Dell desktop computers for teachers and students. Bellew had to update the raM in them; otherwise, they’ve required very little. about two years ago, Bellew bought from cDi computers an additional 60 refurbished Dell laptops for the high school (as seen in the picture below). for each laptop, she needed a wireless connection and a fairly decent processor. “i started looking at them when the budget got tighter, and i saw they had warranties on them,” she says. She also discovered that they were half the cost of new computers. “i don’t think we could live without them now,” she says. Bellew concludes, “i just don’t feel the need to get the latest, greatest processor … because of the cloud.” —Angela Pascopella 94 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