Case Study Ashton Park School
By Ross Hamilton, IT Network Manager
About 2 Years ago our ICT Coordinator began planning to introduce 65 Apple Education iMacs to Ashton Park School. Initially, there was some concern about this, largely centered around integrating Apple hardware and software into what had previously been a Windows only system, and the intention to use Apple’s beta Bootcamp software to make Windows available on sixty of the iMacs. The school environment requires machines to be in use for as much as seven hours a day, and to be a benefit to the learning environment they need to ‘just work’.
Once the Apple iMacs arrived I had already started to get the iMacs ready. Using NetRestore (a free disk cloning tool produced by Bombich software) we were able to setup the iMacs within a week of receiving them. Once past this stage I was very happy to have Bootcamp and Mac OS X in our school and more than happy to administrate them as well. Over the last 6 months I have managed to structure our network to allow members of staff and children to login to Mac OS X with their windows username and password and allowing them to access saved work from our windows servers (i.e. full integration with Active Directory and the Windows file servers).
I have also developed my own skills with Apple technology – I currently use an Apple MacBook Pro to administrate our network using Parallels and Apple Remote Desktop. On a personal level, I feel this has made my job easier and more fulfilling.Since we succeeded in getting Mac OS X to use our existing Active Directory system for authentication our ICT Coordinator has given students the option to choose which operating system they wish to use for course work. As an additional benefit, since the students have been using the iMacs we have had no vandalism at all. This is a drastic comparison with our previous computer room setup where vandalism· (graffiti, theft of mice and keyboards, damage to hardware) was an ongoing issue.
Update:
After the sucess of the orignal deployment we have now introduced an additional 50 iMacs into the network. This has been yet again another great success for the school.
We Have also been made an Apple Regional Training Centre. This centre will offer free training to local schools for using some of the fantastic apps on OS X.
