An Apple Question

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Permalink Reply by Mathew Needleman on March 21, 2008 at 2:59pm

I would say that the Macs just work out of the box. There are some minor adjustments to make in terms of clicking here vs. clicking there but it's not hard.

The most important things to invest in is that teachers really need to have their own laptops in order to play and plan and some professional development time will need to be devoted to training.

In terms of software, with iLife built in you will not need much more to start doing some really cool stuff.

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Permalink Reply by Kathy Epps on March 22, 2008 at 2:27am

Our kids use iBooks and Mac Minis, and I wouldn't change for anything, in spite of a lot of shoulder shrugging on the part of a PC-oriented staff. They just hold up really well in the hands of little kids.

For software ideas - have a look down the right side of this blog for the list of software we have installed on the iBooks. Most of it is free, or comes with the computers.

For staff training - there is a really good "switch to Mac" tutorial on the Apple web site. I use the metaphor of being bilingual - folks need to speak Mac and PC. No big deal. Just takes time and practice, like a language. How much depends on the skills and attitude of the "speaker".

Your first point about K-1 - (Personally, I think kids that age have better things to do than use computers! They can be involved in the classroom with technology, by discussing pictures together, or commenting on videos, or exchanging text with other classes, or something like that.) But if you must "teach computers" with them, the Apple advantages are the very visual interface, the solidity of the OS, and good software aimed at the very young (see Kudlian's Splosh and Pictogram, for example).

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Permalink Reply by Anthony K Whelan on March 26, 2008 at 3:15am

Hi, my name is Tony Whelan, Warrnambool, Australia. I've been teaching computers for over twenty years. I use PC and Mac happily. There are several schools that I know of that use both PC's and Macs. You don't have to get rid of the PC's, but if it's Microsoft that's causing you grief, switch your operating system over to Linux. I prefer Macs, although they have their draw backs. You won't be sorry if you switch over to Mac. I always end up working in schools that have PC's. I have convinced my principal to get a mac for an autistic boy in my Year 7 class (13 year olds). Macs are packed with great software that comes bundled. You can even have MS Office, and Mac Office is fantastic. You could also get Open Office which open source and you pay a nominal fee. If you want to see my web site, check it out. It is easy to set up, and you can have podcasts, vodcasts, images, slideshows and writing. I use it to communicate to my students. The beauty of it is that you can burn the site to cd or dvd at the end of the year, and keep it as a memento, or record. The kids can make their own sites, but they needn't have them on the web. They can have them stored on the intranet, or just to their computers, and at the end of the year, burn the site to a disk to keep as a memento of their year. This is called 'ejournaling'. iweb is a great way to compress huge files, and all the student's subjects can be stored. The Mac Books have inbuilt cameras, and so the students can video themselves, take a photo, etc. Garageband is a brilliant program which everyone will love, especially your musicians. I must go, but check out my site:

http://web.mac.com/kingswarrnambool

All the best, from Tony, Over the top not down under. ps you can get your kids to use ipods to help with reading and math. Check out my weekly spelling movies.

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Permalink Reply by John Hendron on March 26, 2008 at 5:29am

I am not sure they will have great answers for all these questions, they will for some. We are an all-Mac district (2400 students in central Virginia) and I'll echo what Mathew has said: they just work. I think you'd enjoy better support; we currently have 3 folks dedicated to supporting over 2000 machines.

I am responsible for training all of our teachers (new hires included) at the start of each school year. Many come from PC backgrounds. We do 12 hours of training (9 for OS X, 3 for PowerSchool, our student information system).

In that training, I go beyond what most would: my philosophy on computer training is to follow a Gestalt model: teach them the system, not individual applications. I find this pays off for the year; I answer far fewer questions. I write our own training manual and use that for the instruction. We couldn't be happier with the Apple experience. Good luck to you.

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Permalink Reply by Ben Tantillo on March 26, 2008 at 12:42pm

Our district switched from pc laptops to macs this year in the 4th year of our 1:1 program. We were on a Novell network so there was much to work out. As this is my first experience with macs, I would have to say that we are quite pleased. The iLife suite is great for students and teachers. As stated before, it works. In addition the casing is much more rugged than the pc laptops that our students were using.

We had training on the OS at the end of the year when we have half days for finals (hs district) and worked on iLife during the same time and during professional development days in the summer.

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Permalink Reply by indigo196 on March 26, 2008 at 6:24pm

I would focus on hardware issues because without proper answers to that all the rest of the stuff will not matter.

Background: I am a system administrator in a district with 1400 Apple computers running 10.4 or 10.5 and 1600+ Dell/HP computers running Windows XP SP2. In most cases the sofware that my schools use on OS X is available on Windows so I do not see that as a positive or a negative when comparing the hardware. In general I have found that managing OS X computers to not be as easy as the Windows based computers (The district uses OD for OS X computers and AD for the Windows computers so I am comparing each companies native tools).

I also have a question if you would be replacing your server infrastructure or not. If you are not and you have Netware or Windows 2003 AD that might cause some 'backend' issues. My district has been working with Apple for four years trying to get our Apple computers authenticating to AD (so we can have one logon and integrate our Apple users with several third party products that only support AD) and nothing has worked under 10.3 or 10.4; I am currently testing 10.5 and making some progress.

Questions:
1. When I compare prices on Apple computers (laptop or desktop) I see many PCs (Dell/HP) that cost as much as $400 less (specs are roughly equivalent); how can I sell such an increased cost to my community?

2. How easy is it for me to setup the equivalent of 'mapped drives' at logon as I can with Netware or Active Directory?

3. Have the issues with 'mobile users' and file synchronization been worked out or are there still some issues that cause problems for disconnected OD users?

4. Does Apple have a product equivalent to Windows Server Update Services that points my client computers at an internal 'update' server to get updates? (This is to conserve internal to external bandwidth and allow time to test that 'updates' don't break currently deployed and used software before it is pushed to the client computers)

5. Does Apple have a free of cost product that allows for the remote management of client computers similar to Remote Desktop that is bundled with Windows for free? (I believe you will find that Apple charges $300 per admin seat for their Remote Desktop software - you only need this for your techs though so it is not super expensive)

6. When a new OS version is released will my district have the ability to 'downgrade' newly purchased machines until we are ready to upgrade all the Apple computers to the same OS version? (This has not been the case in my district since OS X was released and it causes issues when trying to keep things consistent for training and troubleshooting)

7. (assuming you will go with an Apple server backend) What products does Apple sell that will allow for teachers to access their files from home using a web interface? If Apple does not have any what products would integrate with OD? (We have been unable to find one that works with Apple OS X servers, but we had one included with Netware and found a 3rd part provider that integrated with AD)

8. With the emergence of products like Google Docs, EyeOS and other replacements for desktop productivity suites what is Apple doing in the future to stay relevant in a world in which an inexpensive laptop, coupled with an OS and a browser may be all that is needed? (I have this same question for Microsoft)


Despite all the 'negative' questions listed above (they are hard questions that Apple should have to answer) I do feel that Apple and OS X is a good proposition for Elementary schools, and Art and Music at all levels. I do think that Apple has yet to come up with enterprise level solutions that allow you to manage your backend environment and clients; I do admit that my knowledge of Apple is mostly through the eyes of my Apple Sys Admin, though I am slowly learning the ropes of 10.5 since he was hired away by Apple.

My personaly recommendation would be to use the more expensive Apple computers in certain areas or at the elementary schools and use the PCs at the secondary level. This gives kids exposure to two types of computers and better prepares them to use them after school (where most computers are Windows based). I would also urge you to change one lab or maybe one school over before making a huge leap.

Feel free to buzz me here if you or your IT staff has some specific questions that are technical in nature. Good luck.

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Permalink Reply by Matt on March 27, 2008 at 6:33am

Thanks for your feedback (everyone). Our Technology Coordinator is out here also. His questions were focusing on the hardware aspect of Apple and his questions seemed to go along with Indigos. We've been trying to get the Macs we do have to work with our Windows 2003 servers with little success.

Overall though, we have been very pleased with the Macs and how few help desk tickets we've had on them. (Roughly 30 Macs and only 2 tickets all year).

Thanks again for everyone's feedback. I'm off to meet with them now.

Matt

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Permalink Reply by indigo196 on March 27, 2008 at 10:39am

Good luck -- keep us posted on your findings.

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Permalink Reply by Alan Hodson on March 27, 2008 at 8:00am

As a support person dealing with Windows, Linux and Macs, I am pleased to let you know that Apple (or Apple support groups) will be able to address almost all of these concerns, basically because OSX is a customized Linux environment, and a great deal of the solutions that work for Linux work also for the Mac. In some instances your techs might have to "get under the hood" and customize a little code, but any properly configured Mac system will play well in a Windows environment. The question might me, why have a Windows environment at all, when a Mac enterprise solution WILL make your life easier...

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Permalink Reply by indigo196 on March 27, 2008 at 10:29am

Alan H:

Not sure it will be easier -- my Windows environment is much easier to manage currently than the OS X environment. I am slowly learning the Apple environment to assist my Apple techs after the last Sys Admin we had was hired away by Apple. I do agree that if a Windows environment is mis-managed that the experience will be worse than with a mis-managed Mac environment... but a properly managed Windows environment is very easy to manage. Most of the tickets we have on the PC side are end user knowledge issues and I would suspect those would not go away with a Mac and OS X.

When we (IT) were forced to allow Windows users to be 'administrators' on their PCs we had lots of issues, but since we have changed that to make them 'users' those issues have gone away. The Apple folks have always locked their users down, but I suspect they have not fully made use of OD and Workgroup Manager.

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