Good news for my mini-netbook project

I spent last Monday meeting with a group of various staff from the Academy, discussing and planning a range of ICT issues for the Academy, with particular reference to the new £26 million building which is due to be fully opened in September 2012. I shared with them my vision - now also the vision of the Heads of Learning and most of the teaching staff - to bring mini-netbooks into all classrooms in the manner I have described in several earlier posts. They were sold on the idea, so much so that it was agreed to run a trial of seventy netbooks in daily classroom use in the second half of the autumn term. I now have Heads of Learning queuing up to be part of that trial!

But what came as totally new to me, and which excites me enormously, was the suggestion of the ICT Manager that we also trial a thin-client system over the whole term, which will enable us not only to bring back into use older PCs no longer fit for current use, but also to virtualise the netbooks. What this will mean is that these little PCs will be able to act as clients to the Xen system we will be using, and to run all of the software available on the network, regardless of the processing requirements.

Suddenly it becomes obvious to me that these little machines could become a very big seller to schools, if they all catch on to this idea. Problem is, it seems that these solid-state storage netbooks are going out of style, and machines with hard-discs are replacing them, at higher cost, and with serious battery drain overheads, and it was the duration of the battery charge which was one of the major features which suited netbooks to regular classroom use. I am in the process of trying to get into a dialogue with Asus to see if they might reconsider this.