Common IT Classroom Infrastructure.
In this article we describe IT management solution for IT classes, or any other classes that use personal computers as student workplaces. In general teachers or trainers conduct lessons in such classes by using teacher’s pc and multimedia projector for subject demonstration and asking the students to perform lesson tasks on their personal workplaces. Common IT infrastructure of such class is simple. It contains teacher’s PC with connected multimedia projector and several student PC's. Student PC’s are generally combined into one LAN segment and connected to the teacher's computer. This is usually made to give access to lesson materials with the use of a network share to all students.
IT Classroom Management
Hardware management of IT class is usually easy. Network is set up once and forever, no hardware change is necessary in a normal situation. But the situation with the software is rather different. Typically there are many lessons devoted to different subjects are held in one classroom. Each lesson requires its own software set for student workplaces and teacher's pc. The problem that arises is how to manage all necessary software sets on student workplaces and keep them ready for each class. The other problem is how to clean up the hard disk of the computers after students, removing all the necessary files and restoring the software configuration. This problem arises even if software set is unified and not always can be solved by restricting user rights.
Paragon Deployment Manager provides a solution that can help solve both problems.
Paragon Solution for IT classrooms
Deployment Manager can be used in IT classrooms for software maintenance. It can store all software configurations that should be used on students PCs and rollout them later on demand. Using Deployment Manager in the classes, user can benefit from the following:
- Deployment Manager makes possible to transfer configured and well tuned software instead of the direct installation. When software set needs to be changed Deployment Manager makes rollout of the image of the drive to the student's PC. This helps to easily create, store and transfer student working environment by creating simulating situations on prototype PC before classes.
- Time to setup the class dramatically reduced. Using Deployment Manager, user can completely change the software configuration of the computer in terms of ten-fifteen minutes. This can save a lot of time and make breaks between the lessons shorter. For some customers it means that they can conduct more lessons in a day or conduct lessons with different software at the same classroom.
- All software configurations once prepared can be stored and later used by Deployment Manager. No need to setup environment every time for each student PC.
- No special IT stuff is needed for maintenance. All computers can be updated simultaneously by single person. The process of deployment does not require human interaction and can be done even by non IT-professional.
Deployment Manager is installed on to teacher's machine. It stores all necessary system configurations and software sets for student PCs. Also it contains deployment Session Templates, which are the routines of the system rollout. They contain the list of operations that should be done with particular student PC before classes. In order to prepare PCs for certain classes, all that customer should do is to run a deployment session based on specific template.
See how it works for IT classes on scenarios page. For more detailed information, refer to our workshops.
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