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Schools and Technology
May 18, 2012 at 11:53 am
I have long known my public school was lacking in the area of computers. I don't mean this in a hardware sense, but more in the sense of software, regulating students, and the school's single Administrator. Now how could you possibly mess up with software at a school... Well, they run a multitude of different Operating Systems, ranging from XP to Win7, also a couple of rigs running VMware as they can't directly run a os? Now that's not THAT bad.. The worst of the worst is by far.. The fact that they are running Internet Explorer on every Pc, on top of that, the IE versions are from years. So now we've covered the software aspect, however there's more to share with you.. The whole time i've been in highschool, the IT has been attempting to block facebook, however he has failed multiple times. The IT somehow messed it up so bad, that it randomly blocks it on certain pcs, you can login it won't work.. Log off and log back in and it will etc. The above example was recent, he also managed to block Facebook and youtube for not only the students, but for the teachers as well.. This took him about a week to fix. In his carelessness he also set the passwords on many school sites to that of the actual admin pass on most of the pcs. I really don't know how it could get any worse... Half of our teachers don't know the difference between IE and firefox, and most have a hard time working their pcs at all...
If your school is worse, or (was) worse, please comment and tell me abuot it... I believe my highschool has taken the award for stupidity.
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RE: Schools and Technology
May 18, 2012 at 1:05 pm
Where do you live? A single admin in the schools is how it is done where I live, I know this because it's my job. Every government agency I've worked for uses Windows XP images and Dell computers. That would include the Army and the School District. We just received 113 new Dell 990's here, which ship with Win 7 home premium and we slap the School District's XP image on top of them. The internet filtering is done at a higher level by a third party and the individual admins in the schools have no control over this. As for internet explorer, many webpages, state and federal ones in particular, are designed specifically for IE. For example, some aspects of People Soft do not work properly with Chrome and I have to use my IEtab Extension to get it to work.
My highschool only had computers in the Visual Communications class, so be happy you even have computers.
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RE: Schools and Technology
May 18, 2012 at 2:56 pm
I don't know how it is in other parts of the world, but in the UK, IT lessons seem to be about using Word and Excel, nothing about how IT systems work, nothing about other operating systems. Maybe the Raspery Pi will change things but I suspect that most of the teachers will need to learn about it first.
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RE: Schools and Technology
May 18, 2012 at 3:50 pm
(May 18, 2012 at 2:56 pm)zebo-the-fat Wrote: Maybe the Raspery Pi will change things but I suspect that most of the teachers will need to learn about it first.
No it won't.
People fail at dealing with abstractions because they don't want to learn that abstraction to the degree that utilizing said abstraction properly as attainable while also understanding enough of said abstraction to call an expert.
Or, put simply, People are lazy that they don't fin-
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RE: Schools and Technology
May 20, 2012 at 2:04 pm
(May 18, 2012 at 1:05 pm)Mosrhun Wrote: Where do you live? A single admin in the schools is how it is done where I live, I know this because it's my job. Every government agency I've worked for uses Windows XP images and Dell computers. That would include the Army and the School District. We just received 113 new Dell 990's here, which ship with Win 7 home premium and we slap the School District's XP image on top of them. The internet filtering is done at a higher level by a third party and the individual admins in the schools have no control over this. As for internet explorer, many webpages, state and federal ones in particular, are designed specifically for IE. For example, some aspects of People Soft do not work properly with Chrome and I have to use my IEtab Extension to get it to work.
My highschool only had computers in the Visual Communications class, so be happy you even have computers.
The school i go to is rather small so i can somewhat understand the single admin. For some reason our school still has multiple OS's, and i'm not sure how they obtain them. I guess they buy them cheaply, as they are always out of date by a couple of years. Now you can't really blame a school for trying to do it cheaply, except our teacher's salaries are higher than that of the local colleges by almost double. >_>
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RE: Schools and Technology
May 20, 2012 at 2:15 pm
(May 20, 2012 at 2:04 pm)SavageNerdz Wrote: The school i go to is rather small so i can somewhat understand the single admin. For some reason our school still has multiple OS's, and i'm not sure how they obtain them. I guess they buy them cheaply, as they are always out of date by a couple of years. Now you can't really blame a school for trying to do it cheaply, except our teacher's salaries are higher than that of the local colleges by almost double. >_>
Ah, the internet. A place where I can hear a someone whine about being exposed to a myriad set of OS's and hardware. Be grateful you have the opportunity to mess with them without needing to buy/pirate them.
A true multi-OS (not old versions of windows or a single OS) ecosystem is the most healthy and stable if set up properly and kept within certain constraints.
In any case, it sounds like your school has forced their IT to acquire systems as they go, and probably second hand ones at that. Cheap.
Still, I can easily imagine how to set up a stable, segmented network while using old/varying technology using subnetting, gateways and vlans.
You guys are cheap on your IT. Reap what you sow.
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RE: Schools and Technology
May 20, 2012 at 6:20 pm
(May 20, 2012 at 2:15 pm)Moros Synackaon Wrote: (May 20, 2012 at 2:04 pm)SavageNerdz Wrote: The school i go to is rather small so i can somewhat understand the single admin. For some reason our school still has multiple OS's, and i'm not sure how they obtain them. I guess they buy them cheaply, as they are always out of date by a couple of years. Now you can't really blame a school for trying to do it cheaply, except our teacher's salaries are higher than that of the local colleges by almost double. >_>
Ah, the internet. A place where I can hear a someone whine about being exposed to a myriad set of OS's and hardware. Be grateful you have the opportunity to mess with them without needing to buy/pirate them.
A true multi-OS (not old versions of windows or a single OS) ecosystem is the most healthy and stable if set up properly and kept within certain constraints.
In any case, it sounds like your school has forced their IT to acquire systems as they go, and probably second hand ones at that. Cheap.
Still, I can easily imagine how to set up a stable, segmented network while using old/varying technology using subnetting, gateways and vlans.
You guys are cheap on your IT. Reap what you sow.
Christian town, our IT goes to the same church as the School board members.. I have more knowledge than him, and i'm 17. If it was up to me i would standardize the school. It took the IT a week just to replace IE on a computer.. (Used ubuntu and took it off the HDD) I'm very experienced with OS's, i see no reason to be using three different ones though.
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Schools and Technology
May 20, 2012 at 9:03 pm
How small can you school be? I manage about 400 pcs by myself.
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RE: Schools and Technology
May 20, 2012 at 11:47 pm
(May 20, 2012 at 9:03 pm)Mosrhun Wrote: How small can you school be? I manage about 400 pcs by myself.
400 students max, maybe 150 Pcs.. I doubt even that. lol The dude just doesn't know what he's doing.
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RE: Schools and Technology
May 21, 2012 at 11:12 am
Just sat in a Webinar today and we'll be implementing Win7 images next year. The older machines will be on XP.
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