Raspberry Pi as an everyday computer in primaries?

[AlexM]

Am looking for thoughts, experiences and comments on a proposal from our Schools Service to push Raspberry Pi's as a replacement for desktop PCs. They'll be running an office suite, be used for surfing the internet and accessing Office 365 on a daily basis in primary schools.

 

I do have my views on this which I will share but wanted to see if my views were in-tune with other IT professionals working in schools?

 

Look forward to hearing your thoughts.

[Steve21]

Nope. Next.

 

Seriously though, if you're running programs like that on it you'll start hitting into other issues like paying for CALs etc still to connect to Windows servers in relation to doing file storage/accounts etc.

 

Your management costs will increase due to the time to do anything to them all. They'll be very slow for anything major you want to do and run into problems accessing websites that use certain technologies.

 

Not to mention the "real" cost of them once you start adding in accessories, power, cases, cards etc. You could just buy a refurb machine for £80~ that does much more with a long warranty

 

Edit - To expand that on another point, we had a governor at an old primary who decided rather than buying a proper computer for their gate access/camera they'd run a Pi as a cheap alternative from a suggested company, and basically binned it due to it's bad running, lack of management and generic performance.

 

Steve

Edited March 17, 2016 by Steve21

[AlexM]

Those were my thoughts to be honest. I can see that they would need a lot of supporting as time goes on and having found them relatively easy to corrupt the OS on let alone all the other issues I'm at a loss as to why this is even being thought about seriously. We've just got rid of the beige boxes out of schools and then we're going to replace relatively decent machines with units that just don't hit the grade at all...

[Steve21]

No doubt it's because of the silly marketing "hey new pc only £19!!!"

 

Steve