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Green Schools Look at the Zonbu |
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Written by Stew
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Thursday, 06 December 2007 |
 'Being Green' is as big an issue in the education sector as any other, and in many ways it appears that schools are perfectly placed to move on up the green ladder and reap the massive benefits of doing so. The Green California Schools Summit in Pasenda closed off this evening after 3 days of focus on the strategies, technologies and services that schools will be able to take advantage of in years to come.
Technologically speaking, schools are in an excellent position to use newer technological advances in modern computing. Schools require whole rooms of easy to manage computers that simply work, allowing students to sit down log-on and get on with their studies. Thus the traditional desktop PC has become a cumbersome, antiquated solution to the school computer problem - and one reason for this is children. Having spent a lot of time around children, I can honestly support the notion of having a solid yet flexible server based infrastructure in the classroom rather than the old line of desktops with their local storage. In short, change is also being fueled by the need for a more rational infrastructure.
Children have the amazing ability of being able to break anything. I know. I was one. Kids like nothing more than to 'play'; pressing buttons here and there and generally causing havoc. I've seen kids deleting parts of an operating system, simply because they wanted to see what would happen. That child-like curiosity can kill a computer in moments.
 This is where the techies have to come to the rescue. Take for example the Zonbu, my favourite mainstream thin client (esque) model. The Zonbu has only a very nominal amount of local storage, with data being backed up on-the-fly in the background to their very own server. In this situation, the students can simply sit down and start doing whatever it is they want to do, surfing the web (with certain safety features protecting their innocence of course), writing an essay as a text document or developing a spread sheet for science class or even playing a game, and when they are done their data is safely tucked away on the server.
No homework can go missing (or be eaten by the dog), no virus can infiltrate the system (being Linux based) and the rugged Zonbu can be knocked about at will - having no moving parts to break. The next day, the same student can simply sit down at any other Zonbu and continue where they left off. By logging onto the system, their settings and preferences can move with them to any other Zonbu. Sweet as candy.
Schools spend fortunes every year on system maintenance. And even then, it's one hell-of-a-job to get them all working. "Teacher it's doing the blue screen thing again!!" Schools and Universities are deciding that there simply must be a better way. A way that can help them save buckets of cash through saving on energy bills that would be better spent on other vital education purchases.
Schools and head teachers are learning that using a server-client based system is not only better sense for infrastructural reasons, but can lower dramatically the amount of fuel used. This is better for the environment, the planet, me, you, your neighbour and everyone else on this green Earth.
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