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Course: Silicon Schools Fund and Clayton Christensen Institute > Unit 4
Lesson 3: Blended learning hardware and infrastructurePutting the right hardware and infrastructure in place
Created by Silicon Schools Fund and Clayton Christensen Institute.
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Video transcript
- On the infrastructure
and hardware front, we're actually not going to go too deep because the reality is that
a lot of these decisions are common sense, and
the reality on the field is actually changing
every six to 12 months, so we just want to give you a few tips as you think about these decisions. - Yeah, and the first tip is
that the design of your program is going to influence the
kind of hardware you need. If you're going for an
ambitious flex program where kids spend a large
portion of each day at their own time and
choice, when they're online, you're gonna probably need one-to-one. And if you go to a station rotation model, in which there's three stations, you probably need one computer
for each three students, but the model dictates your tech needs. - Now either way on that though, you're going to need a lot of bandwidth, and our friends at the
EducationSuperHighway recommend that you have
100 megabits per second for every thousand students, and that seems like a
pretty good recommendation that if you don't have,
you're gonna choke your blended learning model. - Right, and if you take a look
at the EducationSuperHighway website they have a nice testing feature, so you can actually see
how much you have in your setting that you're
in doing education. But the network is usually
the place where we see most of the problems,
either not enough bandwidth coming in or even just bad
internal configuration. - Now of course you have to
think about your charging, your outlets, and security
as you dive into this, and we're seeing a lot of
schools move away from this fixed model of desktop
computers chained to an outlet with an ethernet cord,
and much more toward using laptops and tablets
with charging stations that allow you to get
power for an entire day, and we would note that having
power for an entire day on a device is really
a critical requirement to do these sorts of
blended learning models. - And schools think about charging in a couple of different ways. If they keep the devices at school, they usually have a
system where every student plugs in before they go
and the teacher ensures that the devices are fully
charged when kids arrive. If you send the students
home with the devices, you have to build in a
routine that requires them to do the charging and bring back the devices fully charged. Just trusting students
to do this on their own, probably not gonna work out for ya, and you might even need a backup. So set up a station in
the room where there's a couple of charging outlets set up, and students can work there
in case those two kids forget, and don't bring a
charged device to school. - On the device front, your
choice is really between desktop, laptop, or tablet. Now Brian and I aren't here to
endorse a particular product, and we don't have any
allegiances or compensation per se from any of the folks out there, but what we're seeing is
that schools are generally moving toward adopting
Google Chromebooks right now. There've been a bunch of market surveys, as well as in our blended
learning universe, we're seeing this has become
a clear trend right onw, and we think that the
reason for this is that Chromebooks are
significantly less expensive than a lot of the other options out there, they're often just $250 a pop, and also they're far easier to manage in a blended learning environment. They charge for a full day, so
you don't have to constantly figure out where you're
gonna recharge the computer, and because they operate in the cloud, they're really interchangeable. You can do your work,
store it in the cloud, and then jump on another Chromebook, and leave just where you left off, and so they're really user friendly in these blended learning
environments right now. - Now the one downside
to Chromebooks is that you generally need a wireless connection for them to have their full functionality. So if you're in a school
that has good wireless, they can be a great
option, but do make sure that the software you want to
use is Chromebook compatible, and this is only an issue
if it's not web-based. If it can be run on a browser, you should be fine on the Chromebooks. - Now we also hear a lot of
schools moving toward iPads, and iPads certainly have a cool factor, and there's also a lot to like about a tablet form for computing. Reading is a lot easier on these devices, and for younger students
it's a lot more intuitive to use your finger and just
swipe along on a device, rather than trying to figure
out a trackpad on a laptop. In addition, a lot of the
apps that are emerging are only available for mobile devices, which means that you'll need a tablet if you want to use those. - People are very excited about tablets, and I like tablets too, and
I have seen tablets used best with the youngest kids. Kinders, first, second grade. In my schools, and what
I've seen also a lot is usually around third grade and up, and even second grade and up, teachers want a physical keyboard. It's easier for the
kids to start typing out whole sentences, paragraphs, and essays and papers and reports. - So do think about the
cost, and whether tablets actually cost more than having a computer, but then also do think
about this keyboard question because if students are
producing a significant amount of content, generally
schools are telling us that that keyboard is still a necessity because it can actually get really hard to think about typing a
paper on your touchscreen, and if you get one of
those flip keyboard cases to go with your tablet, at
some point you're creating a more expensive version
of what a Chromebook already has at the $250 price point. - One other thing to think about is how you're going to manage the
devices across your school, and Google's actually done
a really good job here with the Chromebooks
by providing a central device management system that
allows you as an administrator or you tech lead, to push
out updates to all devices or sync settings, or
bookmarks, and so forth, which makes it really easy
and seamless to update. - Schools are often tempted
to buy these really low cost netbook or cheap PCs because
the initial purchase price looks so attractive,
but you forget how much time and energy it takes
to maintain these machines. Every time there's a new software update, or you install software,
your tech team has to go computer by computer by
computer to update these, which is a maddening process if you're talking about 30, 100, 400
students in a school setting. - So it's really important
to think about all of these costs, and repair, and servicing, as you're considering
which devices to buy. Really just think about it
as a total cost of ownership, and there we also think that the nod goes to Google Chromebooks
because they're just frankly a lot less expensive
when you look at the total cost you'll put in over the life of the device. - Now there are certain
tasks that still require more of a hard heavy duty computer. If you're running AutoCAD or you're doing real video editing, you
might need a dedicated room or set of computers
that can run Photoshop, and have full computing power, but if you don't, that's
where we think there's some better options than the
old fashioned large desktops.