Ardence in Schools and Colleges

With more and more emphasis being placed on IT based learning and on-line curriculum material schools are having to come to terms with PCs on the desktops of students who not only know how to use them but who also like to "experiment" with the capabilities of what they have in front of them. At the same time the schools have to manage these PCs with very limited budgets and normally nobody who is a designated and trained IT Administrator.

In the last few years many schools have addressed this problem by installing a Windows Based Terminal solution such as Citrix or Tarantella systems. These are excellent systems and have been very successful but when schools started to run multi-media and rich media packages with a lot of interactivity the limitations of terminals quickly became apparent, they are very poor at streaming media. A lot of schools now have a mixture of terminals and desktop PCS to cope with the requirements of the newer curriculum material but this puts the complications back on the desktops.

The Ardence Solution

There is no disk drive inside the desktop PC it boots using PXE from the Ardence server and when the user enters their credentials the PC displays the desktop image appropriate to that user at that time, for instance it could be class 4 at 14:00 on a Tuesday therefore the PCs are loaded with the current History curriculum material. There is nothing else on the machine and no facility for fiddling with it, if a student does break something a simple power off and on will load a fresh image.