Is Chromebox viable for classroom replacement?

Chromebooks have been out for a while now and have made a huge impact in 1 to 1 initiatives for many school districts around the country.  What makes them so attractive is the long battery life that can last an entire school day and the ability to boot into the O/S in under 5 seconds.

For some time now I have been looking at alternatives to desktops in the classroom.  At the school district I work for we have 4 student computers per classroom in K-8, which is costly when it comes to electricity usage and keeping up with life cycle replacement.  Thin clients had been promising due to each unit using anywhere from 20 to 65 watts, depending on the device, and reduced work orders for fixing viruses and Windows issues.  Although the initial investment is still high with the servers and software licensing required for virtualization.

What is a Chromebox?

The Google Chromebox is relatively new low cost option which is similar to the Chromebook as far as running the Chrome OS but it doesn't come with peripherals or a screen.  Most models have USB ports, HDMI or display port for video, LAN port, and built in wireless.  The Chromebox also only uses 65 watts of power making it a attractive replacement for desktops.  The ASUS model ships with a 16 GB SSD hard drive allowing for some local storage if needed.

With everything moving to the cloud and having all services being web based, there is very little need for windows based systems in the classroom.  Sure, you still need Windows based computers for your labs to meet course requirements that run productivity systems like Office, video editing, and CAD. In the classrooms though there is little need for Windows when Chrome OS can handle Google Docs, web browsing, and other web based services.

Let's talk about savings

The ASUS Chromebox runs for a total of $209.99, $179.99 for the box and $30 for the license. This can be a significant savings when it comes to life cycle replacement compared to paying $500 per desktop computer.  For our district we would need to replace 488 units, which would be a total cost of $102,475. Compared to buying desktops it would be a savings of $141,525.  Not to mention the huge cost savings per year on the electric bill, going from 350 watt power supplies to 65 watt.

Other thoughts

Other things to think about is reduced licensing cost for Microsoft Office and antivirus since it is already built in, so one less thing to worry about if you happen to pay for antivirus. By going the route of Chromeboxes it should significantly reduce work orders and allow an organization to increase devices without having to hire additional tech staff.

For the next school year we plan on testing this with a couple of classrooms for the first semester and see how teachers and students react to the devices.  If it ends up working out well, it very well could be a full replacement option in the future.

Have you considered looking into Chromeboxes?

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?