IT in the next 3 years

[philjones2000]

Hi Folks

 

As everyone fears the upcoming budget cuts I've been ask to develop a three year program for replacing/refurbishing our ICT equipment.

 

I know! How long is a piece of string? Does anyone have a crystal ball and can tell me what they think will be the biggest developments in ICT and biggest strain on our budgets over the next three years?

 

I don't know if three years ago I would have seen online reporting or vle's taking off in the way they have. Maybe.

 

What do you guys think?

 

Phil

[jamesreedersmith]

Smart Tables?

All students having a netbook/laptop and the infrastructre to support it?

Home Learning (webcasts of lessons?)

 

Just some ideas to consider?

[teejay]

Best thing to do is to make sure your core infrastructure is flexible to change as much as possible. For us it meant moving to a virtualised server infrastructure and moving to a unified storage system.

[Tricky_Dicky]

We are looking into this as well and personally I think our main outlay over the next few years is going to be replacing hardware which hadn't been replaced for years before I arrived.

I agree with James about the laptops totally. Having invested in a good wireless network over the summer I think we should be alright, but if you haven't done it yet then look in to it.

I would also try and allow as much as possible for the best internet connection you can afford. If you have 1000 pupils at the moment and it's starting to strain just imagine what it will be like when new schools aren't built so you end up with 1500 pupils all trying to watch iPlayer and YouTube in HD ("Well it's much better at home and works fine there!" ).

 

Rich

[localzuk]

Well, if your school is anything like ours, the biggest strain on our budgets over the next 3 years will be

 

• Projector replacements
  
• Smartboard replacements
  
• Projector lamps
  

 

Things I'd be looking to do in 3 years time? A yearly suite replacement of 35 machines, replacing printers that are costing us a fortune to run with ones that cost less to run, and deploying the remainder of our wireless LAN (we're doing it in phases).

 

New things that we may see? The introduction of more personal devices is a likely one.

 

I know that I'd want to start replacing switches in 3 years time, with Gbit to the desktop and 10Gbit fibres - so will also need to replace some of our older fibre runs (prorbably about 500m of it, with 30 or so terminations).

 

The thing is, your ICT plan should be tied in to the school development plan. What does that say?

[teejay]

Problem is, the op was about how to develop a plan which accounts for anticipated budget cuts, having laptops for students etc, although a nice idea requires massive budget increases, not budget cuts.

[jamesreedersmith]

But we all know that bugdet cuts in IT will still mean more equipment - we just have to spend smarter.

[webman]

Every kid needs an iPod Touch.

[jamesreedersmith]

Itll be an IPhone with calls and text allowance next too!!

 

James

[TechMonkey]

I don't see any way of planning for cuts. The only way I can think of classify things. So you have a NEED or IMPORTANT section & make sure it is used for things that are really desperate or needed to keep the status quo. Then a LIKE section, things you that would use to move forward or follow a plan that you have. Finally a BLUE SKY or FUTURE section for things that if there was money you would do to make things even better.

 

This way you have the stuff that really needs doing whatever else happens, you can compromise or debate the LIKE section if money is tight & you can be gracious & drop the future stuff if there isn't money to show you are willing to compromise. You also have a list of things for next year ready to be moved up into your plan section.

[bossman]

@all:

 

I see the biggest IT investment will be coming from the LA's and central government by way of home IT access development from various sources.

 

What better way than to get the little students to have access to learning from home then eventually all schooling to be accessed this way via VTLE's, it a governemnt plan to see cuts in the education system via closing of schools and teacher redundances which will pay for the internet access of all homes.

 

This is a key issue at the moment and financially it would take an awful strain off the governments budget deficit along with new schemes to save even more money in the NHS and other public services.

 

Mark my words it will happen eventually as this country becomes absolutely dependant on managed services from other countries to meet budgetry requirements even at the detriment of our childrens education and families wellbeing. :)

 

Obviously this will happen in time but not over the next 3 years I might add.

[nicholab]

TCO=total cost of ownership of needs to come in. Basically what HP say donning more with less.

[dhicks]

As everyone fears the upcoming budget cuts I've been ask to develop a three year program for replacing/refurbishing our ICT equipment.

 

Move all your applications to be web-browser based (not neccesarily running on servers away over the Internet, local servers are going to be faster, just have everything run via a web interface). Then, when Windows XP stops being supported, move all your workstations over to Linux machines that boot straight in to a web browser, similar to Google's new Chrome OS. That way you don't have to pay for any upgrades to Windows, you don't have to buy any more copies of MS Office and most of your hardware will carry on working just fine if you shove a bit more RAM in it.

 

--

David Hicks

[srochford]

Do you have an existing 3 year plan? If so, it's a case of looking at that and saying things like "we'll make desktops last 4 years instead of 3 years", "won't replace TFT monitors at all unless they fail" and so on - this means that you saying what you can cut rather than someone coming in and saying "no spending on IT and, by the way, we need XXXX new doing as well"

[webman]

Move all your applications to be web-browser based (not neccesarily running on servers away over the Internet, local servers are going to be faster, just have everything run via a web interface). Then, when Windows XP stops being supported, move all your workstations over to Linux machines that boot straight in to a web browser, similar to Google's new Chrome OS. That way you don't have to pay for any upgrades to Windows, you don't have to buy any more copies of MS Office and most of your hardware will carry on working just fine if you shove a bit more RAM in it.

 

How do you do video editing, music compositions or use peripherals such as scanners and CAD/CAM machinery?

[dhicks]

How do you do video editing, music compositions or use peripherals such as scanners and CAD/CAM machinery?

 

You write a web-based video editing package, a web-based audio-editing package, a web-based interface for the scanner which you attach to its own dedicated machine and a web-based CAD/CAM system which you also give its own dedicated controller machine.

 

The original poster did say this was a 3-year plan, if he gets a move on he should have enough time.

 

--

David Hicks

[webman]

You write a web-based video editing package, a web-based audio-editing package, a web-based interface for the scanner which you attach to its own dedicated machine and a web-based CAD/CAM system which you also give its own dedicated controller machine.

 

The original poster did say this was a 3-year plan, if he gets a move on he should have enough time.

 

When you say 'you', do you mean the literal in-house IT team at the school, or do you mean "anybody"?

 

If you meant the former, for argument's sake, let's assume that the in-house team do not possess the relevant skills to do this (it's quite a tall order). So they spend time (which costs money) learning, and more time (which costs more money) actually developing and testing; to produce something that only them are likely to be able to support. And still maintain the regular IT support status-quo during this period of development. I'm failing to see the benefits to this.

 

Either way, to say that new web-based software should be written for demanding tasks such as that, with a three-year time scale, is pretty far-fetched in my opinion.

[ricki]

Hi

 

If the budget is a bad as its being suggested from April I think the moto for the year will be "make do and mend."

 

Richard

[tim.dalton]

Actually, I think David is probably right about web tools... This kind of thing is becoming more common- look at Google Docs for example. Maybe you shouldn't be factoring in building your own, but there are plenty of cloud projects around that have the potential to achieve this.

 

Online audio/video editing is starting to appear now- http://aviary.com/tools/myna is a pretty good online audio editor.

 

If we're saying that students will be using their own devices/working from home/using handheld stuff then we have to be planning around web tools so they can work wherever they are.

 

Tim

[dhicks]

When you say 'you', do you mean the literal in-house IT team at the school, or do you mean "anybody"?

 

Probably "anybody", as in this would be best run as an open source project of some kind.

 

If you meant the former, for argument's sake, let's assume that the in-house team do not possess the relevant skills to do this (it's quite a tall order).

 

I reckon that cloning a Windows Movie Maker style video-editing application, on a server local to the school, is actually a lot less involved than people seem to think. For editing video - seeing how a bunch of video clips fit together, with transitions in between - you don't need any more than YouTube-quality video. You need a server that will read a bunch of video off various storage / video devices, store one high-quality copy and produce a quick-to-load FLV version that can be presented to the user for chopping up in to clips and putting in transitions. Credits and voiceovers could be added. If you wanted a zoomable timeline then you could get the server to render individual frames from a clip as JPEGs on demand. This, by the way, is where I think Nvidia are aiming their new GPU chipsets - batch-job graphics operations accelerated on the server, not neccesarily high-performance desktop graphics.

 

Scanning can be done with network scanners (we do this already), and CAD should run okay over Terminal Services / VNC, so all you need is a web-based TS/VNC termional (a Java-based VNC terminal already exists).

 

Either way, to say that new web-based software should be written for demanding tasks such as that, with a three-year time scale, is pretty far-fetched in my opinion.

 

But it's silly, all these people in all these schools all over the country spending all our time mirroring the same tasks as everyone else, wasting time getting assorted client-based software to stop falling over long enough for it to be useable. If just a couple of schools would get on and write a web-based application that we all need we could all be using trouble-free web-only machines in 3 years, no problem.

 

--

David Hicks

[webman]

@dhicks: Fair argument. As a web developer by night myself I do see the benefits that central web-based stuff brings, and always advocated the use of web-based things over full local binary installations where appropriate. We have lots of that sort of content here at the school, and it certainly makes distribution a breeze.

 

However, I still think there are certain things that are still not easily accomplish-able over the web, or as much as what you could using a local application.

[teejay]

With web based apps, has anyone investigated building an internal cloud computing environment using something like Ubuntu Server? Wondering if this could be used to deliver things like google apps?

[GrumbleDook]

@dhicks

Nice idea for web-based editing solution apart and could be handing to students to learn concepts and basic skills ... but you are forgetting one tiny thing. Education is amount preparing kids for the real world and if anyone gets a job doing any sort of significant video / audio editing then the above will not cut the mustard. If you have to cough up for it to deliver KS4/5 courses then why not allow all students have access to it?

 

Similar goes for other graphics intensive materials ... would you ask an artist to paint using a remote control car (future Turner prize?) or give them an easel with canvas and paints?

[dhicks]

With web based apps, has anyone investigated building an internal cloud computing environment using something like Ubuntu Server? Wondering if this could be used to deliver things like google apps?

 

This "cloud" idea is probably not suited to schools. For stuff like we've just discussed - video editing, photo editing, audio editing, etc - you can assume an Internet connection is always going to be be several orders of magnitude slower than a local network. Yes, Internet connections might (?) get faster over the next few years or decades, but by then local networking technology will have gotten faster too and people's expectations of what they should be able to do with a computer will have risen. You can assume that a school will always need its own local servers. This also avoids your school's data being held by some random external company that might / might not let you use it how you want.

 

I doubt Google plan to let people run a local version of Google Apps (although I could be wrong there, they did sell search engine appliances at one point, so maybe app appliences are something they have planned for a few years time), so when you say "local cloud" you'll have to run stuff on it that designed to be downloaded and installed on a local cloud system. This is why I chose Xen as our virtulisation platform - that's what Amazon Cloud uses, and I figured people would be relasing multi-server cloud-architectured applications by now.

 

--

David Hicks

[webman]

@dhicks: I'd like to as you a question. Can you (at present) carry out your day-to-day tasks exclusively using web-based tools; and if not, could those non-web tools be easily replaced with their web equivalents?