Mouse77e

WOW! Can you imagine if that happened to Windows? Sorry but there seems to be a little too much sniping on Apple for the sake of it going on. I have move on to the core infrastructure decisions and away from the end user devices. But thank you for your interest... Bah Humbug!

I am getting to agree with you - In fact I have just reached out to the consultant working on one of the local school's projects and offered him beer in return for an initial chat!

Ephelyon - Many thanks for your understanding. To answer your question; I am one of a group of parents working to open a much needed secondary school I am a geek by profession but a creative web geek - hence I come seeking knowledge! I AM an Apple user / fanboy but that dosn't mean I am closed minded or wearing blinkers to other brands As a group our concern is to make the BEST POSSIBLE school for our children - there is no other agenda! Time is against us. The local council's provision for secondary school places is less than adequate. As of 2014 the provision of places is short by 8 - 10 classes We are working to a budget. My primary focus is on the backbone infrastructure. user devices will come and go but the network needs to be the best that I can get, it won't be changing anytime soon. I need advice on the best possible solution to hedge my bets on future proofing the school Having tentatively spoken to a couple of suppliers their focus in not on the capital infrastructure but on the ongoing revenue stream - if anyone else starts a meeting with - So... let me talk to you about MicroSoft's exciting [cash cow], Office 365! Murder will be done! (Rant over) Again, Many thanks!

Wooly Headed? Me? - possibly Guilty as charged. As I said in an earlier post This is the first time I have been involved with opening a secondary school - several theme parks, yes, schools no. We have been in someways influenced by many of the team being professional Mac users, often in more traditionally Windows roles. The relative rarity of malware is a factor as id Apples separation of OS and data. BUT I think that makes my quiery here more telling. If I had made up my mind, without reservation, I'd have got into bed with the Apple store and it would have been a job done. I am here to canvas opinion, perhaps play devil's advocate to test my preconceived ideas... Again, any and all feedback is welcomed.

So - having read the comments, and I'd like to share with you our starting point for the tender document we're going to put out there soon. Many points have been brought up from this forum - Feel free to poke holes in it (constructively please) ======================================= How the use of ICT will support learning, teaching, management and administration of the new school. The school requires a secure, safe, simple and flexible ICT system to enrich pupils and staff. We have the full range of abilities and all must be comfortable with the system we provide. Buildings The school buildings are envisaged to be either new build or custom refit’s of existing school buildings. It is deemed best to move directly into a section of our property and extend the facilities as needs be. Network We are planning a wired network infrastructure terminating in wireless access in each education spaces. These hubs will support wireless learning devices for the student and teaching bodies. A second secure network will be reserved for the administration of the school. The provision of specialist network access may be required for specialised ICT or Music teaching spaces. Broadband High speed broadband, preferably using future-proofed fibre optic connectivity should be built into the site and throttled to suite the load on the system as the school expands on opening. Classrooms Each education space should be provided with a large media screen. Either a data projection device or large screen monitor/TV linked with a data connection device such as an Apple TV or other suitable devices. We would like to embrace the recent developments in the National Curriculum towards ICT proficiency and stimulate the classroom experience through handheld devices. Whilst Microsoft and Android devices offer a range of choices we feel at this time Apple’s education infrastructure and devices, iBooks, iTunes U, iPads offers a more valuable choice. We would also like to use technology to reduce our carbon footprint by limiting the volume of photocopying, printing to paper and the inherent wastage therein. We would prefer to used Apple’s iBook’s or similar to reduce the reliance of text books that are ever more frequently revised or cast aside by new curriculums. We however foresee the need for a limited number of networked printers for those times when printing to paper is a necessary resource. Perhaps one per group of classes. NB. We may have to research items such as the TabCabby 32 if we go for the class by class option. Pupils We would like to examine the options for distributing devices to the student body either on a class by class (devices to remain in the education space) or to issue a device to each student on an extended basis Teachers We would also expect our staff to be equipped with a laptop to create the textbooks and interact with the school. Administration We expect to equip our administrators with Apple desktop machines which will be updated and refreshed regularly on a three year lease cycle. We believe having reliable infrastructure for the administration of the school is vital. We would like to examine the possibilities of using cloud services such as Google Docs, Zoho, Dropbox or Shareware/freeware solutions such as NeoOffice or OpenOffice to limit licensing costs.

All good points, thank you. On the subject of BYOD -vs- Single vendor whether that is iPad, Samsung Tab, Dell Laptop, whatever... Isn't it better to use one device and support it well than to have two or three tier education based on parental income? Perhaps this is playing Devil's advocate here but if you have a class where one child has a second hand Dell running XP, next to them is a child with an Android tablet and next to them is a child with an iPad, trying to run a system to support and provide for the lowest common denominator detrimental to the education needs of the whole class? Or would you subscribe to using one device - a tablet - as a text book solution to be fully supported and let the child use their BYOD as their 'exercise' book?

To answer a couple of points, and to help you to advise me - The school will indeed be a secondary school, starting from 2014 there will be an intake of 200 or so students per year. The focus on iPads has been shaped by two factors - dependant on one device per child - one of the schools we have talked to has made £60,000+ digit savings on photocopying alone by sending corse work and letters to parents etc as emails. Add to that the savings in text books by teachers making or buying in iBooks. We are in the position where we have funding and support to open the school and use IT to influence and shape the teaching within the school - what we don't have is the experience of opening a secondary free school. Many thanks for all input - it is greatly appreciated.

Dear All - I seem to had been volunteered to write my own brief for today's ideal infrastructure for a new free school. The whole thing from the internet connection to the WiFi to the printers to the record management system - from soup to nuts as our American chums would say. Some of the ideas in this video from Apple - Apple (United Kingdom) - Essa Academy - resonate strongly with the education team on the project and to be honest limiting the time spent on antivirus alone is worth the cost. As school IT professionals and my fellow geeks I'd value your opinions, thoughts and input. Ask any questions - I'll do my best to answer. Many thanks Mouse

Sorry to state the obvious here but why not talk to the business team in your local Apple Store - they are throwing money at education like it is going out of style...

Hmmmm would it be too simplistic to just buy a Mac?

Here is what you should do: Uninstall other 3rd-party NTFS software, like Paragon, Tuxera or NTFS-3G. Edit /etc/fstab (you can do this with "sudo nano /etc/fstab" Add the following line: LABEL="THE_NAME_OF_YOUR_VOLUME" none ntfs rw,auto,nobrowse Quit your editor (if you used nano, you can do this with Control-X, Y, Enter as Carlos said) [*]Reboot, or if you prefer just unmount and re-mount the partition using Disk Utility [*]Voila! You have read-write support for this partition in OSX Caveat: As of Mountain Lion, the nobrowse mount option is required for this to work. This means that the partition will not show up on your desktop. However, you can access it normally through Finder by either: Run Terminal and type "open /Volumes/THE_NAME_OF_YOUR_VOLUME" (without the quotes In Finder, press Apple + the up arrow over and over until you see all of your mounted volumes. Your volume will be listed here. From Apple.com https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4152122?start=15&tstart=0