New Hardware...New Options

Grants are great. Just when you're sure that there's not enough money to drive innovation in your program, a pot of money materializes. Not every time, and certainly not with any degree of certainty, but just often enough to help maintain sanity and faith in humanity. Such was the case with a program that just helped us place five Dell SX 280's in our Education classroom. These desktops will help support our community college-based programs for library/media assistant students and inservice/preservice paraeducators. To supplement the systems and to demonstrate to the students that there are ways to get the functionality they crave without the expense usually associated with commercial software, we are outfitting the systems with open source software solutions from the The OpenCD (http://www.theopencd.org/) including Open Office, The Gimp, PDFCreator, and Firefox. Since many of our students either work or will be working in libraries and schools that lack significant financial support, commercial applications are not always an affordable choice.

One issue became clear as we were spec'ing and ordering these systems--USB mass storage is pretty much the personal storage unit of choice. We chose smaller hard drives and skipped the floppy option in order to maintain our CD/DVD-ROM functionality. Because of its small form factor, the SX doesn't have loads of space...so you make choices. While we'll probably have at least one USB flop drive around the shop somewhere, students will be encouraged to go USB. We spent some time agonizing over this decision, because many of our students seem to subsist on a week-to-week basis monetarily. In the end, the combination of better pricing for USB devices coupled with financial aid support for "required" class tools (books, paper, thumb drives...) made the decision a bit easier to bear. The flexibility and convenience will certainly outweigh most problems, and we're pretty excited about the move.

Check back periodically. I'll write about how we're leveraging the systems to deliver instruction and help our students be successful.