Comment MacOS X School Labs (Score 2, Interesting) 674
(Note: I do know that many of things below are capable on other platforms)
I am a consultant that supports numerous K-12 schools and one of my clients, a High School, is very happy they standardized on Mac OS X. The school had used cheap PC's in the past running Windows 98 and were looking to upgrade. They were getting no support from the district and the machines barely ran and were constantly infected by virus and students P2P software. The teachers pushed to have Apple systems purchased and the district finally obliged. They received 250 new machines and hired me to get everything functioning.
There are 1800+ students and 65 faculty that I support by myself using a combination of Mac OS X Server and open source tools. On the server side I use Apple's Admin Tools, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Radmind, (a suite of Unix command-line tools and a server designed to remotely administer the file systems of multiple Unix machine), Moodle, Carbon Copy Cloner, NetRestore and PHP iCal. All of these items are free or ship with OS X Server which saves the district a lot of money. Their are four OS X Servers that are all administered remotely which helps save them money by not having to have me at school all day long. They have a problem, they e-mail me, I fix it.
All of the client machines are running 10.2.6 and a variety of proprietary, shareware, freeware, and open source software. The school really likes the amount of free and or shareware software I have installed. Here is a brief list of some of the freeware apps I install, Aquatomic, Franklin, EdenGraph, Physics 101, Trade Strategist, Stop Motion Studio and there are so many more but I won't bore you. (they also utilize all of Apple's free apps including iCal, iMovie, iDVD, and iPhoto) I manage all log-ins, downloads, apps that can and can not be used, who can use which machines, and mount home directories all from the OS X Servers. This set-up saves the schools bandwidth by not allowing students to download, install, and run their P2P software.
I am not going to tell you this is a perfect set-up, or that everything works the way it should, but I can tell you that using OS X in a large school setting is a cost saver in terms of IT support when done properly. The district cannot believe how easily I manage all of these machines and is now considering implementing similar set-ups in other schools.
I am a consultant that supports numerous K-12 schools and one of my clients, a High School, is very happy they standardized on Mac OS X. The school had used cheap PC's in the past running Windows 98 and were looking to upgrade. They were getting no support from the district and the machines barely ran and were constantly infected by virus and students P2P software. The teachers pushed to have Apple systems purchased and the district finally obliged. They received 250 new machines and hired me to get everything functioning.
There are 1800+ students and 65 faculty that I support by myself using a combination of Mac OS X Server and open source tools. On the server side I use Apple's Admin Tools, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Radmind, (a suite of Unix command-line tools and a server designed to remotely administer the file systems of multiple Unix machine), Moodle, Carbon Copy Cloner, NetRestore and PHP iCal. All of these items are free or ship with OS X Server which saves the district a lot of money. Their are four OS X Servers that are all administered remotely which helps save them money by not having to have me at school all day long. They have a problem, they e-mail me, I fix it.
All of the client machines are running 10.2.6 and a variety of proprietary, shareware, freeware, and open source software. The school really likes the amount of free and or shareware software I have installed. Here is a brief list of some of the freeware apps I install, Aquatomic, Franklin, EdenGraph, Physics 101, Trade Strategist, Stop Motion Studio and there are so many more but I won't bore you. (they also utilize all of Apple's free apps including iCal, iMovie, iDVD, and iPhoto) I manage all log-ins, downloads, apps that can and can not be used, who can use which machines, and mount home directories all from the OS X Servers. This set-up saves the schools bandwidth by not allowing students to download, install, and run their P2P software.
I am not going to tell you this is a perfect set-up, or that everything works the way it should, but I can tell you that using OS X in a large school setting is a cost saver in terms of IT support when done properly. The district cannot believe how easily I manage all of these machines and is now considering implementing similar set-ups in other schools.
