The School District of Philadelphia broke ground on its "School of the Future" in 2004. Today, students attending use Tablet PCs for course material, notes, and assignments. Classroom equipment is state-of-the-art. There is no doubt that the Philly SOF has influenced school technology plans at a world wide level.
Franklin County Regional School District is a few hours to the west, outside of Pittsburgh, and they’re exploring ways to bring advanced technology to their students and teachers. The state of Pennsylvania funded $423,000. What equipment have they selected? 60 interactive whiteboards, projectors and mobile PCs for the teachers, along with peripherals like printers, still cameras, webcams and video cameras. Students will have access to 270 mobile PCs that are distributed through the school on nine carts. Sounds like a great start to a one-to-many classroom.
To me, the most interesting comment in the Tribune Review article was about the school’s old equipment. You might expect that physical damage would be the top reason five year old PCs don’t work. But Joe Baker, school technology coach, states drive capacity is also a limiting factor.
One concern he had was the technology becomes obsolete very quickly. Laptop computers the school purchased in 2002 are almost useless. He said the basic software on the new computers takes double the total storage space available on the old computers.
"If you’ve seen any of them, they’ve really reached the end of their life cycle," he said.
Yes, technology does advance quickly. Five year old PCs — let alone old notebooks — may have a little more juice left in them, but probably within a closed system and not very mobile. Upgrading becomes difficult, whether it is software or peripheral compatibility. I can understand why this school is now trying a one-to-many approach to technology.
Joe’s statement raises a great point about how long a school can rely on an individual PC.
A schools planning to use mobile PCs for 5 years understands that the PCs will be used 180 days per school year so 900 school days, 7200 hours if the PCs are used all day at school and at least 10,800 hours if the kids take the PCs home. (Note: 24/7 one to one computing hits over 6400 hours of PC use in 3 years. PCs on carts or in labs may be used fewer hours, simply because they aren’t integrated into the curriculum the same way.) Compare this to a typical enterprise mobile PC where there are 50, 40-hour work weeks, which is 2000 hours per year and is replaced at around 6,000 hours or 3 years. If most schools are using enterprise level mobile PCs, is it reasonable to expect them to last longer than it would in a business?
Based on your experience, what do you think is a reasonable duration for schools to keep PCs? When your school buys new PCs, do they hope they’ll last for 3 years, as is standard in enterprise, or 4, 5, 7? Take into consideration that the more a PC is used during the school day, the greater the return on the investment.