Losing the ICT Suite

[mukz]

Does anyone have per year costs of desktops vs laptops, desktops are cheaper and last longer to start with, then factor in time, I guess desktops are 3 times cheaper, but I don't have actual numbers.

 

I had something from 3 years ago, but deleted it like a numbnut! Essentially, the pros and cons of both were

 

Desktops- pros

Fixed stations, can monitor easily. Cost much cheaper.

 

Desktops - cons

Benching costs

Cabling costs (switch gear, electrics etc)

Less space

 

Laptops - Pros

Mobile

Allows use anywhere

 

Laptops - Cons

Expensive

Trolley or other method of storage (expensive)

Easy to break

Chargers go missing if not a charging trolley

Wireless infrastructure has to be robust

 

Thats just some of the pros and cons

 

Mukesh

[Joanne]

Laptops and desktops are almost the same price now no?

 

I've just bought some Lenovos for £250 each... i3, 4GB, 128SSD.

 

If you can get me a same spec desktop and a monitor for less I'd be interested to see!

[mavhc]

Laptops and desktops are almost the same price now no?

 

I've just bought some Lenovos for £250 each... i3, 4GB, 128SSD.

 

If you can get me a same spec desktop and a monitor for less I'd be interested to see!

 

Which core i3, and ex VAT?

[Joanne]

I've got well over 100 laptops here in my primary and I don't have such issues.

[dry]

I've got well over 100 laptops here in my primary and I don't have such issues.

Would be interested to hear how you're managing Windows Updates when laptops are shut in trolleys overnight and turned off.

 

Sorry, don't mean this to come across in a negative tone- I'm genuinely interested as this is an issue we're facing.

[mukz]

Laptops and desktops are almost the same price now no?

 

I've just bought some Lenovos for £250 each... i3, 4GB, 128SSD.

 

If you can get me a same spec desktop and a monitor for less I'd be interested to see!

 

Which core i3, and ex VAT?

 

Also how what is the warranty?

[crc-ict]

Hi there,

 

My primary school might be undertaking some large scale building work, and I'm being asked to assess a possible future without an ICT Suite.

 

Has anyone had experience of this? What would be the best way forward for a 440 pupil primary school with no dedicated ICT Suite?

 

Thanks - Simon

 

Don't do it!

 

We lost ours as part of building work just before I started here about 4 years ago. Went netbooks and Google everywhere, then Chromebooks.

 

What happened? This year, we ended up spending lots and lots of cash refurbing another part of the school and building in a new ICT suite. We couldn't see a sensible way of integrating the new Computing curriculum without one. Laptops are just a nightmare, and expensive too.

[GuyJD]

Would be interested to hear how you're managing Windows Updates when laptops are shut in trolleys overnight and turned off.

I've got mine set to shut down when the lid is closed and disabled sleep/hibernate this way when they are put back in the trolley, they shut down and install any updates that are waiting before powering down.

[Joanne]

I'm on Windows 10 LTSB, so updates are not often. They tend to install when laptops are shutdown. I let them be free. Don't have enough space on my server for WSUS.

[Sheridan]

We've got lots of suites in our secondary and I've tried a few times to offer 'mobile' alternatives but generally the teaching staff seem to prefer the 'easy' option.

 

I guess from a teachers point of view, would you rather take your 30 kids into a room where the 30 computers are pretty much guaranteed to work (and quickly) and be able to walk away again at the end of the lesson, or have to unplug a load of ipads/laptops fire them up, realise half aren't charged, wonder why a couple suddenly won't connect etc and then have to stash them all away again at the end of the lesson!

 

Don't get me wrong I think mobile solutions have their uses, but in addition to ict suites. We've got a few notebook trolleys for blocks where a fixed ict suite is not possible and some trolleys of ipads for use in specific departments where they have a few apps they want to use.

 

Our primaries all still have one suite with mobile devices used as well - which seems to be a happy balance.

[Guest MD5T]

IT suite always get my vote. Laptops are just a nightmare to manage. Students never plug them in/ teachers never watch them as they're always too busy. Cables and chargers always get damaged and teachers simply don't give a sh*t.

[AlanD]

I think ICT suites are always a bad idea. It fuels the perception that ICT is some separate activity from normal school work. ICT should be integrated into normal school work - and not require a class to "move house" to perform an ICT related tasks. There are lots of laptops that have tamper proof keys, SSDs and hardened glass screens- and triple stream networking - which needs to be 5Ghz - although not necessarily "ac". Don't buy laptops that don't meet this requirement - however cheap they seem - because they will turn out to be more expensive in the long run. We still have 8 year our core 2 duo laptops (admittedly originally with non SSDs) which are still working just fine - well better than fine. Ipads are great - and can be used for lots of ICT activities - although chrome books are probably a better buy.

[ITGURU]

Dektops are easier for patch management. I find a lot of laptop updates failed due to losing battery charge, switched off during updates.

With desktops I can roll the updates out at 4pm, then the pcs will reboot if no one logged on (or install when staff shutdown) then all patched ready for the next day.

[AJWhite1970]

I've got 5 ICT suites (three generic suites, one specialist lab for DT and one full of integrated Casio keyboards for music) plus three laptop trolleys (16,16,32). Room utilisation is just under 90% with maths, geography, history, MFL and politics being major users of the suites which can be booked 4 weeks in advance.

 

Apart from a ten week ICT induction in year 7 (taught by me) we don't offer Computing at GCSE or A level but my head wouldn't be without IT and is always complimentary as to how it's run and integrated into the curriculum.

 

Thankfully no danger here of loosing any suites but I feel the pain of those who are being forced down that route.

 

Andrew

[Katy]

We merged with another school and had a new build primary with no IT room (previously we had 3 IT rooms across the two former primaries), instead we have three trolleys of 15/15/16 (two shared between years 4/5/6 and 1 between the rest). Learning Support have got 7 PCs. In our senior school we don't have any laptops besides the odd one used for showing powerpoints on a portable screen. There is just me (systems manager) and a senior tech (based in the senior school) covering the entire site so we don't have time to do much looking after/babysitting them.

 

We've had nothing but trouble with them, but if you can get the teachers trained (or somebody is there to look after them) then it shouldn't be too much of an issue.

 

- Laptops not charged as they weren't put away properly, or trolley was unplugged to move it and never plugged back in

- Laptops never get shut down properly, so you end up with "Windows is unable to log you on: insufficient resources" because 300 people have logged on then hit switch user

- Laptops not on the wireless because the kids have hit the key that disables it

- Windows not establishing the wireless link before they attempt to log on

 

The degree of pain you get will depend on if you are expecting them to perform domain logon over wireless or not. Windows randomly doesn't bring up the wireless in time (even though it's set to "wait for network") so the logon fails on some, reboot fixes it but it occurs randomly.

 

You will definitely want SSDs, ours (i3 2nd or 3rd generation, 4GB RAM) came with normal hard drives and after the first year had slowed down considerably, I guess the drives don't like it when kids drop the laptops while they are on! Changing these out to SSDs reduced our support calls by a huge amount. We are just now trying a "laptop monitor" system where some of the keen year5/6 kids are in charge of making sure the laptops are actually shut down when returned to the trolley, plugged in etc.so hopefully this will improve things further.

 

Tl;DR: only works if you can get the teachers to look after them, or have the time/spare IT staff to check them daily

[ITGURU]

We merged with another school and had a new build primary with no IT room (previously we had 3 IT rooms across the two former primaries), instead we have three trolleys of 15/15/16 (two shared between years 4/5/6 and 1 between the rest). Learning Support have got 7 PCs. In our senior school we don't have any laptops besides the odd one used for showing powerpoints on a portable screen. There is just me (systems manager) and a senior tech (based in the senior school) covering the entire site so we don't have time to do much looking after/babysitting them.

 

We've had nothing but trouble with them, but if you can get the teachers trained (or somebody is there to look after them) then it shouldn't be too much of an issue.

 

- Laptops not charged as they weren't put away properly, or trolley was unplugged to move it and never plugged back in

- Laptops never get shut down properly, so you end up with "Windows is unable to log you on: insufficient resources" because 300 people have logged on then hit switch user

- Laptops not on the wireless because the kids have hit the key that disables it

- Windows not establishing the wireless link before they attempt to log on

 

The degree of pain you get will depend on if you are expecting them to perform domain logon over wireless or not. Windows randomly doesn't bring up the wireless in time (even though it's set to "wait for network") so the logon fails on some, reboot fixes it but it occurs randomly.

 

You will definitely want SSDs, ours (i3 2nd or 3rd generation, 4GB RAM) came with normal hard drives and after the first year had slowed down considerably, I guess the drives don't like it when kids drop the laptops while they are on! Changing these out to SSDs reduced our support calls by a huge amount. We are just now trying a "laptop monitor" system where some of the keen year5/6 kids are in charge of making sure the laptops are actually shut down when returned to the trolley, plugged in etc.so hopefully this will improve things further.

 

Tl;DR: only works if you can get the teachers to look after them, or have the time/spare IT staff to check them daily

 

we have several banks of laptops which are used as class sets (30 at a time) We very rarely having any issues logging on to the domain or the wireless not starting up. For laptops we use a mandatory profile so the size is minimal, but then use their full profile for desktops.

 

If it's all configured and you have a managed wireless with load balancing it should all work perfectly.

[Katy]

we have several banks of laptops which are used as class sets (30 at a time) We very rarely having any issues logging on to the domain or the wireless not starting up. For laptops we use a mandatory profile so the size is minimal, but then use their full profile for desktops.

If it's all configured and you have a managed wireless with load balancing it should all work perfectly.

The domain logon issues don't happen very often, I think it may have been more an issue with Win8.1 (we're on 10 now) which used to occasionally "forget" to automatically connect despite being told to via GPO. Main issue we have with wireless is through kids turning it off via the hot key (which on the laptops we have can't be removed)

[GuyJD]

- Laptops never get shut down properly, so you end up with "Windows is unable to log you on: insufficient resources" because 300 people have logged on then hit switch user

- Windows not establishing the wireless link before they attempt to log on

 

Those 2 can be solved with group policy, set them to shut down if the lid is closed, disable switch user and you can set them to wait for the network before allowing login.

 

The other ones you'll need to train staff to spot.

[Katy]

Those 2 can be solved with group policy, set them to shut down if the lid is closed, disable switch user and you can set them to wait for the network before allowing login.

They can, but not if you get complaints about lack of switch user and are forced to turn it back on by SLT. They are also set to shut down on lid close but if someone is still logged on with an unsaved document it blocks it from doing so... wouldn't be a problem if we could have left switch user disabled.

[GuyJD]

They can, but not if you get complaints about lack of switch user and are forced to turn it back on by SLT. They are also set to shut down on lid close but if someone is still logged on with an unsaved document it blocks it from doing so... wouldn't be a problem if we could have left switch user disabled.

I feel your pain, you could just say to SLT it can't be turned back on, it works for me

[mikeprice]

I can't have mine set up to switch off when the lid is closed as the infant staff have to be able to set up a bunch of laptops and leave then closed but logged ina dn on the right thing

 

causes all sorts of problems - including one that sounds an alarm at 8:22 every Monday - but only on Mondays when it is switched on!!

[Katy]

I think whether it will be a success or not all comes down to a couple of things:

 

- Will they be looked after (daily) by IT staff?

- If not, you need the teachers to make sure they are on charge etc,

- If you're forced to not use some of the usual tricks (disable switch user, make them shut down when the lid is closed) then the teachers also need to make sure they get logged off properly

 

Plus the obvious such as wireless being up to the job etc.

[ricki]

Just a thought set these in good

Shutdown on closing lid

Shutdown on pressing button

Disable hybernate

Run script to shutdown any laptops used by kids at set time

Get slt to approve a policy that makes the teacher responsible for charging

Look is wireless charging is now possible for laptops it's used in phones

 

Richard

[mavhc]

I'm confused why you want laptops to shut down on closing of the lid, or at all.

 

https://4sysops.com/archives/automatically-log-off-idle-users-in-windows/

[jmak]

Just a thought set these in good

Shutdown on closing lid

Shutdown on pressing button

Disable hybernate

Run script to shutdown any laptops used by kids at set time

Get slt to approve a policy that makes the teacher responsible for charging

Look is wireless charging is now possible for laptops it's used in phones

 

Richard

 

I'm confused why you want laptops to shut down on closing of the lid, or at all.

 

https://4sysops.com/archives/automatically-log-off-idle-users-in-windows/

Completely agree. My GPO [bold]prevents [/bold] shutdown on closing lid and all button actions. If they're grown ups, you can tell the users that it's their fault if they don't save their work. With primary kids, pretty much every lesson using the laptops would be 100% wasted. With the best will in the world, classroom supervision won't stop 5 year olds closing the lid or pressing buttons.

 

I would do scheduled restarts or shutdowns if you can.