Thinking about going One to One? Read This First

Going one to one at your school district is a huge decision that can impact you for years go come. How can you be sure you are ready for it? There are many factors that need to be addressed before even considering a one to one initiative. If you are in good shape infrastructure wise you can begin moving forward with what types of hardware you would like to go with.

Infrastructure Needs
First you need to see if your existing infrastructure can support a one to one initiative in your district.  Is your wireless network running N speeds and do you have enough wireless coverage?  Do all of your switching segments have fiber optic up links between them? Are segments of your network running at Gigabit?  Is your internet bandwidth enough to support cloud computing and one to one?  Most of these numbers rely entirely on the size of your district and can vary widely what your needs may be.  If you have all of your bases covered in these areas then you should be ready to start researching which hardware you would like to move to.

Hardware: Tablets, E-Readers, Laptops?
So many decisions when it comes to which hardware to choose.  Let's start off with tablets, we have iPad, Android, & Microsoft based tablets to choose from.  The problem with the iPad is it doesn't have flash which eliminates a lot of websites on the internet from ever reaching our classrooms.  Android based devices do have flash but you may not be able to get the same hardware in a few months of your purchase.  The hardware is changing all the time and parts are hard to come by.  Microsoft based tablets are great, they run Windows 7 but they have a high price point which can stop a one to one project dead in it's tracks.

E-Readers have a great price point and both the Kindle Fire & Nook Tablet share the Android market place which is a huge plus. They also feature the ability to rent books and textbooks from the device.  Lastly laptops are a standard device we have known for years that just works.  Lenovo just came out with a 15" laptop that sells for $350 and is much more powerful than a netbook.  It's an excellent price point plus you get a device that runs Windows 7.

A big issue with marketplace devices is the apps can bleed you dry on licensing.  Think about all the apps you might need then how many times you will have to purchase said app on the marketplace.  The numbers will easily pile up.  That's why I prefer having a Windows device because you can get site licensing for software or access everything you need from the web (compared to iPad with the flash limitations).

How to Manage?
This is the biggest question for all of these devices, how the heck am I going to manage them all?  You wouldn't hand out 700 tablets to your high school students without a way to manage them right?  I have seen some presentations on software that are supposed to help you manage tablets but they are lackluster and far from being polished.  There is limitations on what policies can be put in place and no real way to image each tablet.  Pushing out updates and applications is a real pain where you are still touching every device.  My techs don't have enough time to touch that many units.

Laptops are Still the Answer
To be able to manage a one to one initiative we need Window 7.  Why?  Most of us are managing our networks with Microsoft Domains or Novell.  This allows us to continue managing the devices with our current infrastructure.  I use Novell Zenworks to manage all of our computers in the district and by going with laptops I will be able to easily move into a one to one initiative.

Waiting for Microsoft
I am really hoping the Microsoft Surface Tablet that was just announced last week is the answer we have been looking for.  When looking for one to one devices I set my price point at $400 or less.  I think this is a price point that is achievable for maintaining a one to one initiative at our district.  Supposedly this is supposed to be a big iPad competitor and have a similar price point.  There is also the Acer Iconia which I have read good reviews on, it runs Windows 7 but it sell for $545.  That's still above the price point I look for but the price has been dropping over the last year.  Maybe in 6 to 8 months it might get closer to $400.  If I can get a tablet that runs Windows 7 or 8 then I will be able to manage the devices easily and finally move away from laptops.

Next semester we are going to roll out a pilot of 30 laptops at our high school to start our first one to one project.  This was we can iron out the bugs and streamline the whole process before we give it to an entire grade level.

Building a Campus Video Portal with PHPmotion

As a Tech Director for a k-12 school district one of my biggest challenges is managing our district's internet bandwidth.  I use a variety of techniques from throttling services to using our Sonicwall NSA's IPS system to block a wide range of non educational web services that suck the life out of our internet bandwidth.

We only have a 20Mbps leased fiber channel for internet that we are doubling next month to 40Mbps which has to support 1800 computers, 3100 students and 350 staff.  It's not a lot of pipe for that many users and I am always looking for a way to lighten the load.  After some brainstorming I thought, what about building a YouTube like intranet site to host all of our videos?  We have many free video sources and pay subscription services that we can legally download but streaming them through the day eats a big part of our internet bandwidth.  My line of thinking was if I could get teachers to download these videos that they use for their lessons outside of school hours then upload them to our servers it would save a considerable amount of bandwidth throughout the school year.

Where to begin?  I had no idea how I was going to pull this off.  I started off trying drupal addons, joomla addons, kaltura, clipbucket, and a couple other scripts I had found but none of them were even close to a finished product.  After spending two weeks on various software and platforms with install problems, dependency issues, bugs and lack of features, I was just about to give up.  Then, after more research I found a free script called PHPmotion and it was exactly what I was looking for.  A near YouTube clone that was easy to use, professional looking, and supported many audio and video formats.

PHPmotion was highly recommended to run off of Linux as many users had problems with trying to get it to work on Windows server.  I decided my best bet was to load up Ubuntu server 12.04 as the Ubuntu distro has the best documentation of any Linux distro on the net.  I ran this off of a 3 year old server that was retired sitting on the shelf.  It was suitable for the project because it had 1.3 TB of storage, 4 gigs of ram and 64-bit Xeon processors.  It took me a solid week of slow downloads off repositories, fixing some minor bugs, installing undocumented dependencies and unexpected issues with PHPmotion.  After all of that work I finally had a finished product where I did some customization to some of the menu options, removal of social buttons and disabled commenting.  I was able to tweak my video settings on the site to convert uploaded videos to 480p to save on storage space and edited some of the logos to fit our school district.

I plan on creating a tutorial or guide of how I accomplished this to give to other school districts.  I will be posting the guide on this blog as well as giving a presentation on this concept at our state's school technical conference where other tech directors will be able to see what I have built and whether or not they can use it in their districts.

Other Benefits? Teachers will benefit from having a centralized place on campus to put videos plus they can easily share videos with other teachers who may be teaching a similar lesson.  It will eliminate slow loading videos and buffering issues as well.  The only thing that could be an issue in the future is video portal becoming very popular in the district and we begin having storage issues.  Then we may have to look had buying a larger server or sans to support all of the videos.

What do you think?  Could you use a intranet video portal for your company or campus?