Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Computing in the Clouds
Truth be told this class is running pretty close with some issues that we are currently discussing within our school. The first is the linux issue. We purchased last year some mini-laptops that are minimal in power, but are able to meet the needs of a middle school student, which is mostly to research and word process. The downside of these computers is that they run on linux and don't connect to our school network. This means no printing and no saving to student numbers. This has been fine with flash drives to move files when necessary. The reason this has come up is that with our district moving to gmail email service we are now going to have all our students using GoogleDocs for word processing, presentation needs. The fact that these computers aren't hooked up to our school server won't be an issue at all, in fact it is a benefit because there aren't any long waits to log in. The cloud is great for an institution like a school because we can save time, energy, money, labor etc... One of the other issues that we have talked about at our school is allowing students to bring in their own technology into the building and to help them learn how to use their technology effeciently and for the powers of good (learning). This is going to be a big hurdle to clear amongst the people in the building and I'm sure we'll experience some setbacks, but it is exciting to see our school and district try to keep pace with all the developments that are coming our way.
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Sounds to me Jason that your school is on the cutting edge or at least at the forefront. I think you bring up valid points with the word processing and such, however, I would be curious as to how you prevent students from misusing computers without being able to attach to the network. Some other problems I could forsee with this system would be that though all of our students are angels and never do anything wrong, I could see them having inappropriate material on their own computers and bringing that into the school would not be a good thing. The final problem I would have with a system like this is that it would not work for someone like myself as I teach Architecture and Engineering and my programs require much more functionality. We have implemented something to this affect in our computer labs as we have gone to thin-clients, however, we have not gone to extent of moving to cloud as of yet and I don't forsee it in the near future. Please let me know how your school handles the security issues as I would love to know the answers to these questions.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure we will run into problems, this is inevitable when you try new things. What will be communicated to students is that this is a privilege and not a right. It will be understood that you can lose your individual access to technology and that it will always be at an individual teacher's discretion if technology is allowed in their room.
ReplyDeleteOne of our hopes is that by using the cloud for most of our computing needs. This will free up labs and network space for a class like yours or projects that require a lot of power and memory. What we have seen is that a huge majority of the work our students are doing is word processing and research online. Neither of these applications require much in terms of computing, unlike the projects it sound like you would be working on in your class.
I'm sure next year this will come up a lot in our class discussions.