“There are not many secondary schools in the UK where Apple computers vastly outnumber PCs. ICT at St Ninians in Douglas, Isle of Man, is one such school powered by Apple computers. The overall impression you get at the school is of ICT being used confidently and creatively: blogs, music creation, teachers integrating ICT into their work, podcasts (video and audio),” Jack Kenny reports for The Times Eductational Supplement (TES). “In his role as Head of ICT at the school, Jim Hunter is keen to ensure that students acquire a basic competence of the subject which crosses over into many other subject areas: ‘We don’t see ourselves as training students to learn a particular piece of software. We are teaching them to apply a set of principles to any situation,’ he explains.”
MacDailyNews Take: Smart man. You do not teach specific OSes or applications per se, you teach concepts. That way students will be able to learn any application on any platform they need instead of just knowing whatever OS was in use when they were in school with whatever applications the school was using at the time. Things change too rapidly in technology, students should be adaptable.
Kenny continues, “Jim Hunter points to the work. ‘The standards and the quality that students achieve are answers to why we use Apple computers.’ …Students have been making video podcasts using iMovie and Garage Band… “The great thing is that the kids can produce work that looks as though it comes from a media company and they can do that with ease. They get instant pleasure from it. It’s friendly, the programs are integrated together, and they link in a very satisfying way. They are also easier to teach,’ adds Mr Long… All this does not happen by chance. There has to be confidence to back the creativity. Graham Kinrade, school improvement adviser at the Isle of Man Department of Education, is responsible for technical issues across the island. ‘To be honest our technical issues are limited. The hardware is very reliable and general failure rates are very low. The hardware failures I see are down to wear and tear. My personal view is that it’s down to good build quality and the tight integration of hardware and software. Each computer is robust and well designed for its purpose. We have a very high percentage of machines that have been in the field for 2 or 3 years and never had to be repaired by an engineer! This says it all. We never have compatibility issues with hardware and software.’”
“In total Graham is responsible for 3,900 client computers (desktop and laptop). As well as 115 servers, 40 networks, 300 wireless access points (Apple Base Stations) and numerous other pieces of equipment. This is all done with just two technicians,” Kenny reports.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Marc” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Take: Try running over 4,000 Windows PCs (desktop, laptop, servers), 40 networks, and 300 wireless access points in a school system with just two technicians. Go ahead, we dare you.
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Today the Isle of Man. Tomorrow the world!! Ah-hah ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaa……….
It would be interesting to see if school computer purchases could be subsidized by an outside source, in exchange for 50% of the support cost savings over a 3 year period.
I recently toured my son’s upcoming kindergarden classrooms in a Charlotte NC suburb. Whole school 100% Mac. Mostly iMacs and eMacs running OSX and Classic software.
Me so happy. So very happy.
News flash:
Macs vastly outnumber Windows PCs in my house.
Good take, MDN.
Surely we can get a few Windows trolls to point us to a similar Windows installation with only two techs.
C’mon… where is it?
TT races and Manx cats with no tails, and now–TADAHHH! Apples.
(blush)
I didn’t realize the Isle of Man had so many people … or so much money. Got to get out more! Been to London, Oxford, Stratford and Brighton, to Edinburgh and environs, and to Galway and environs. Plan to get to Dublin/Wicklow and to Glasgow, maybe slot Isle of Man after that? Should I live so long?
Cute, real cute … MDN MW is interest … Wheee!
Wingsy wrote: “Surely we can get a few Windows trolls to point us to a similar Windows installation with only two techs.
C’mon… where is it?”
I also would like to see that. 2 people in charge of 4000 computers and other equipment is incredibly impressive. I wonder what the standard ratio is in the Windows world?
Sexist bastards…… what about the Isle of Woman?
I believe the only Macs there are all fathers!
Macs outnumber PCs in my lap. But then again so do hot chicks!!! YEAH BUDDY!!!!!
where the hell are the macbooks!!!!!!!!!!!!
im waiting god damnit!!
“According to the 2001 census, the Isle of Man is home to 76,315 people, of whom around 25,347 reside in the Island’s capital, Douglas (Doolish). This gives the island a population density of 345 people per square mile, or 133 per square kilometer.”
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_Of_Man …
…very interesting reading!
I think that I, too, will divert some of my summer plans to the Isle of Man.
this should be sent to apple and put on their front page
it’s THAT important !
http://www.apple.com/uk/education/profiles/isleofman/index2.html
How will they ever learn to be IT people with job security and a brigade of technicians on your team running all over the place if everything works?
RE: “How will they ever learn to be IT people with job security and a brigade of technicians on your team running all over the place if everything works?”
You’re delusional. Why don’t you visit the Apple OS X Server Discussion boards first before spouting verbal diarrhea.
“just works”, LOL.
From now on, I’m gonna call that place “Isle of Mac”
Lol… we have a winner!
ok.. ORIGINAL steve, can you point us to a 4k windows installation with only two techs running it successfully?
from the site posted above…
“We are responsible for about 4000 Macs in 40 networks across the island and we look after them with two technicians. If they were PCs, we would probably need 100 technicians!”
TOS, are you so jaded you don’t recognize an obvious “tongue-in-cheek” comment without the emoticon? You do realize that’s pretty pathetic. Right? C’mon, your the one who’s insisting the rest of us admit to blemishes, recognize and admit your own.
Every server I’ve ever come in contact with has required monitoring, tuning, fixing, and occasional cussing out. Some worse than others. Sometimes it wasn’t really the fault of the OS, sometimes very much so. I must admit I’ve never been involved with Xserves and don’t know what the problems might be. I’ve tried to set up various ‘services’ on my PowerMac, to serve our household LAN, and been frustrated by some of the “ingenious solutions” Apple applied to things like “where are the config files”. Nobody, but nobody configures their Unix system quite the same way Apple does.
Good point, “The Original Steve”, there does seem to be many posts in the support forums. But let’s look at some real numbers of the more busy of Apple’s support forums…
Forum Topic, avg topics/day, avg messages/day
“Initial Setup, Installation & Migration”, 1.3, 4.6
“Mail services”, 3.6, 21.0
“Files Services”, 2.4, 10.3
“Network Services”, 2.4, 11.7
“Web Services”, 1.9, 8.8
I found it very interesting that the “Initial Setup, Installation & Migration” was not the busiest forum with less than 3 new topic posts every 2 days, and each new topic only had 2 replies to it. Now, browsing though the forum you quickly notice that most of the topics are about the OS X Server’s features and limitations, and NOT about problems with it. Not too many “Help! My — is missing, crashed, lost, or corrupted!” There aren’t even many “How do I set up a —?”
Being that there are not too many independent OS X server technicians under every rock, this site should be swamped with problems considering there are thousands of OS X servers out there (over 2,500 in schools alone).
It takes the same number of IT personnel to manage 4,000 PC’s as it does 4,000 Mac’s. It’s just that the other 80% of IT staff in the PC world are playing Solitaire and Minesweeper (or is it Mind Sweeper?), taking smoke breaks, sending each other inter-office emails, filling out purchase orders, looking busy, ignoring work requests, and speaking gibberish – not actually working.
Apple did carry this story on their web site maybe a year ago. Not many people picked up on the mention of only two support people for thousands of Macs. Perhaps the reason why was that the information was on page two of that story and most people don’t read that far.
I tried to find the story on Apple’s site today, but there doesn’t appear to be any sign of it any more.
The kids also did a video Podcast with Mark Rogers who is now head of Apple for all Northern Europe…
http://www.sch.im/snhs/podcasts/applevisit.html
I work in a Scottish school which uses all HP computers. I rip CDs. I burn DVDs. I put up lessons on the projector. I use speakers to play music or audio of poets speaking their own work. I put lesson plans up on my own website for the pupils to access.
I surf the web and show kids film trailers and get them to write about them. I take pics of the kids playing football and they then annotate the shots for burning to CD. It’s brilliant…….
Of course I do all this on my G4 PowerBook because the HPs are the biggest steaming pile of donkey poo I have ever had the misfortune to use. 10 minutes to log on in the morning and bring up my class register? I wish it was that quick.
Thank god for Nisus Writer, iPhoto, Keynote, iTunes, Pages, iDVD, DVD player, iSync, iCal, GoLive, Quicktime Pro……. And that’s not mentioning my Shuffle and iPod Nano for data transfer, and showing kids thumbnail pics.
Magic word ‘class’ as in: My class teaching is screwed without Apple.