Extend Program
Installing home printers, scanners and educational software
Overview
The overall concept of the Extend program is to provide a means and ways to extend the use of Kristin configured laptops. This information is primarily for parents and guardians with students in the Laptop Program who wish to discover more about the Extend program.
Our Challenge
Our challenge is to provide the ability for students to install additional educationally valuable tools to their laptop while maintaining a stable, resilient and secure laptop for in-class laptop use.
Educational tools could be software or hardware for educational use.
Microsoft Windows XP Professional, the Operating System(OS) on student laptops, has many limitations in the area of OS protection and user-rights. By this we mean that some applications can create problems or conflicts with the host OS, or that there are minimal security levels or sub-levels available to Kristin when configuring users on laptops.
Kristin has spoken to Microsoft about these issues and the response has been that these issues may be addressed in subsequent service packs of Windows XP Professional and most of our particular concerns will be available in the next version of Windows known as Vista. Unfortunately, as of mid-2008, we have not seen this issue adequately addressed in XP or in Vista. Kristin will continue to monitor this situation.
Kristin has a current schedule of releasing a new version of Microsoft Windows into new student laptops in the Middle School Laptop Program beginning in 2010.
Our Response
As a result of the limitations of the Windows XP Professional, and our goals of having a stable and reliable laptop configuration, it is necessary to find a less automatic way of extending the 'rights' of our laptop users in order to add software or hardware based educational tools. As such, the Extend program has been created.
The Kristin community should see an improvement to the ICTS Laptop Extend Program in February 2009. In its current state, the program aims to help students and parents with the installation of home printers and approved software through a set of days/evenings where families get ICTS support on campus.
The official launch of this will be announced in Term One 2009 via the Kristin Newsletter.
The following evenings and times have been chosen:
February 10 from 3.30pm - 7pm
March 19 from 3.30pm – 7pm
Ongoing support for the Extend program is available throughout the year by visiting or contacting ICT Services.
|
