bumps along the way, a bit of learning for me in terms of the capacity
of our network and the limitations of our terminal servers, and
occasional adjustments of expectations, but overall, they have met our
instructional needs and drastically reduced desktop support
requirements.
Although it's time for a refresh (our 3-year lease is up this spring),
the servers and thin clients are generally functioning quite well and
budgets are too tight to justify replacing good equipment. In fact, a
3-year lease on thin clients seems sort of silly. Aside from
occasional failures, the devices have a minimum 5-year lifespan. I
wouldn't object to more performance and storage on the servers, but
they certainly have another year or two of life in them as
mission-critical servers (I'm knocking on my wooden desk at the moment
here, but I'm pretty confident).
So we're buying out the lease and the thin clients are staying. That
being said though, several teachers have asked for labs that lack some
of the limitations of thin clients. For productivity applications and
Internet access, they do quite well. Streaming video can get a bit
choppy if plenty of students are online and graphics applications are
tough. Web content creation, though not generally demanding in terms
of processors, can eat up storage very quickly. Geometer's Sketchpad
works fairly well, but Maple starts to push on things. You get the
idea.
So it's time for a redeployment. Every classroom has a basic (but
solid) dual-core desktop and we have a full lab of relatively new
dual-cores that tends to get monopolized by our science department.
Then we have 3 thin client labs (1 in the media center and 2 classroom
labs). Given that most teachers (with the exception of a few using
SMART boards or doing complex demonstrations) only need Internet
access and basic productivity applications, it shouldn't be hard to
redeploy their desktops into a new lab of standalone computers to meet
the needs of teachers who require more robust computing environments.
If all goes according to plan, we can eek out an extra two years and
plan for a more serious refresh in FY12 and 13. If I go for more thin
clients then (and I expect that I will), not only will I have a nicely
differentiated usage pattern in place, but will also purchase/lease
the clients with the expectation of much longer lifespans. For this
coming year, I'll gladly trade some new desktop/server hardware for
some cost savings and more instructional technology (SMART boards,
interactive response systems, and the professional development to go
with them are at the top of my teachers' lists). Besides, a little
summertime computer moving never hurt anyone, right?