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Schools OS 9 to OS X

pgwalsh

pgwalsh

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jun 21, 2002
1,639
218
New Zealand
I was wondering if anyone involved in K12 has seen any movement to OS X? My girlfriend teaches ages 7 through 10 and she hasn't seen or heard a discussion regarding the move. I've heard Apple is offering teachers OS X for free, but what does that do for students? The School she works at has older Macs that are not G3's. So this makes switching to OS X a lot more difficult.

I see the elimination of OS 9 creating a migration problem in schools. They'll have to purchase all new equipment. The older computers will be useless. Granted they could use them with OS 9, but that's too confusing for the children. With 13 nieces and nephews, I have a little experience with switching OS's.


I was going to turn my G3 400 into an testing computer, but now I'm going to donate it to her school. I hope others will do the same.
 
Be glad the school uses macs...

My girlfriend teaches at a school that uses IBM and dell, you want to talk about migration issues, more than half the computers run Windows 95 and the rest are windows 98.


The school my mom works at uses IBM, which is very odd considering that when i went there as a kid we had apple computers.
 
Originally posted by Thirteenva
Be glad the school uses macs...

My girlfriend teaches at a school that uses IBM and dell, you want to talk about migration issues, more than half the computers run Windows 95 and the rest are windows 98.


The school my mom works at uses IBM, which is very odd considering that when i went there as a kid we had apple computers.
Click to expand...
I'm very happy they use Macs. One issue they have is no support. She does the support for her classroom, but she know very little. It's sad really. I told her I would help if they ever needed it.

She is buying a new iBook. She saw them when I went to look at them and fell in love. So she'll dump her home PC for an iBook. Nice!

But I'm concerned with schools, I'd like to see them stick with Macs, but I think the whole migration thing will cause problems.
 
I'm in higher-ed and I've seen a pretty good migration rate. Many labs here on campus have adopted it, and ours will switch to X in January.

Maybe it's due to the Unix background many techs have on college campuses, or budgetary issues...who knows.
 
Migration Underway

I work for a Schoold district in Suburban Chicago, we are in the process of migrating to X right now. The lab is running Jaguar and a couple of "satellite classrooms" are running Jaguar as well. Things get a little confusing but nothing that is a deal breaker. The response to the new machines runnning Jag is phenomenal! Kids wait in line when the choice is between OS 9 iMac and an emac running Jaguar!
 
Originally posted by shadowfax0
you may want to check out macosxlabs.com, it's all about using OS X in a lab environment
Click to expand...
Intereting site, macosxlabs.org. However, it's geared towards higher education. I'm thinking of public k12 schools.
 
my stupid high school in Utah uses Microns and Dells. I asked one of the techs why we dont use macs.
He said price.
That seems to be the main reason behind all of it. They can get "good" dells for $300 U.S., but cant get a mac for less than $999.
If apple wants schools to use macs......
LOWER THE FRICKING PRICE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
the high school i graduated from will be switching this next coming school year when they move to a new building. the servers are already on X and the graphics labs (pride and joy of the school) are running X...

as for the U of M...aside from the abundance of Dell machines all over campus, there are tons of imacs...every one of them runs os X...only saw classic start up once for MacMolecule
 
Originally posted by mnkeybsness
the high school i graduated from will be switching this next coming school year when they move to a new building. the servers are already on X and the graphics labs (pride and joy of the school) are running X...

as for the U of M...aside from the abundance of Dell machines all over campus, there are tons of imacs...every one of them runs os X...only saw classic start up once for MacMolecule
Click to expand...
Well that's good to hear. What's U of M?
 
Originally posted by rjett
My school is still running OS 8.
Click to expand...

Lucky bugger.

I am going to ramble for a bit and explain the sit at my school.

We stated with 2 pcs and 30 macs (performas).
Moved to 200 pcs and 20 imacs + 12 performas + 2 B+W G3s
Now sold all 266 imacs have a win2k network with stellite access for 350 pcs running win2k (some ts on win95) and have moved macs out of tech drawing into only music with 20 imacs and 10 performas with a d-u modem between them.

They all run OS8.6 and the newest imacs are 333s. i wish we had to consider the move to OSX but as you can see - no good reason (quote from sys admin)

Also

SA: "our new AMD (better than intel i guess) machines are so cheap and easy to use, macs cost too much"

ME: "macs wil let you (only sys admin(SA)) administer them easily, you will be close to the proper ratio of SAs to machines"

SA: "i know, but we are a gov' school and cant afford macs"

Our pc server total downtime = 100hrs per 30 EU
Our mac server total downtime = 5mins per 40 + 5 notebooks

that downtime was the u/g of the G3 450 serving them all to OS8.6 from OS8.

Our pc server is a DP 1Ghz intel w/2GB of RAM and a 80GB SCSI RAID 5 array.


Which is the cheaper solution????
 
Re: Schools OS 9 to OS X

Originally posted by pgwalsh
I was wondering if anyone involved in K12 has seen any movement to OS X? My girlfriend teaches ages 7 through 10 and she hasn't seen or heard a discussion regarding the move. I've heard Apple is offering teachers OS X for free, but what does that do for students? The School she works at has older Macs that are not G3's. So this makes switching to OS X a lot more difficult.

I see the elimination of OS 9 creating a migration problem in schools. They'll have to purchase all new equipment. The older computers will be useless. Granted they could use them with OS 9, but that's too confusing for the children. With 13 nieces and nephews, I have a little experience with switching OS's.


I was going to turn my G3 400 into an testing computer, but now I'm going to donate it to her school. I hope others will do the same.
Click to expand...

i have a couple of graphic design clients as an IT person with business and when i first saw os x in the beginning of 1999, i thought it would take two years

...now, almost four years since i have seen a working beta of os x and os x has been officially released and is now on 10.2...i see design firms in majority going to os x sometime in 2004, but some will start the migration to be fully os x next year sometime

my wife who works at a fortune 500 doing abobe based graphics said the migration, due to cost and slow os x development would take almost five years and that may actually be the case
 
Originally posted by me hate windows
my stupid high school in Utah uses Microns and Dells. I asked one of the techs why we dont use macs.
He said price.
That seems to be the main reason behind all of it. They can get "good" dells for $300 U.S., but cant get a mac for less than $999.
If apple wants schools to use macs......
LOWER THE FRICKING PRICE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Click to expand...


Where do you get $999 from? Apple has volume pricing plans that depend on amount purchased. Don't be naive and go by what you see in the education store, thats for individuals( teachers and students).

As far as $300 dells, I don't think they go that low even with volume pricing, they're about $600 a piece without monitors whereas the emac comes with the monitor, and remember...you get what you pay for.
 
Originally posted by benixau


Lucky bugger.

I am going to ramble for a bit and explain the sit at my school.

We stated with 2 pcs and 30 macs (performas).
Moved to 200 pcs and 20 imacs + 12 performas + 2 B+W G3s
Now sold all 266 imacs have a win2k network with stellite access for 350 pcs running win2k (some ts on win95) and have moved macs out of tech drawing into only music with 20 imacs and 10 performas with a d-u modem between them.

They all run OS8.6 and the newest imacs are 333s. i wish we had to consider the move to OSX but as you can see - no good reason (quote from sys admin)

Also

SA: "our new AMD (better than intel i guess) machines are so cheap and easy to use, macs cost too much"

ME: "macs wil let you (only sys admin(SA)) administer them easily, you will be close to the proper ratio of SAs to machines"

SA: "i know, but we are a gov' school and cant afford macs"

Our pc server total downtime = 100hrs per 30 EU
Our mac server total downtime = 5mins per 40 + 5 notebooks

that downtime was the u/g of the G3 450 serving them all to OS8.6 from OS8.

Our pc server is a DP 1Ghz intel w/2GB of RAM and a 80GB SCSI RAID 5 array.


Which is the cheaper solution????
Click to expand...

That's a good story. It should be posted somewhere. People need to be educated on the benefits of Mac's in situations like this. This isn't the first time I've heard of a story about lowering costs in a network by using Macs.
 
FYI UofM is University of Michigan

We are primarily a Mac district, with pc's mixed in for good measure. Almost all of our Macs run 9 right now, because almost every program we have uses 9 or below. Yeah, we could use classic, but why run 2 OS if the vast majority of the time is spend in classic? We are slowly migrating over, however. With the teacher program that Apple is offering, almost every teacher has a copy of X. We will soon be holding training/installation sessions, so we can get the teachers up and running.
The biggest issue is cost. If we switch all our labs to X, we have to buy all new software, or run it in classic.
BTW, I was the second person in my district to run X(beta). My boss was the first, but didn't like it. Me? Well I'm hooked. I hate downgrading to 9 when people call me with problems, and I have to figure them out in 9. Ah well, the tribulations of being on the bleeding edge:D

BTW: GO BLUE!!! (Even though they lost this weekend to Ohio):rolleyes:
 
My school is presently switching from Macs to PCs. When I asked the head tech guy why they were doing such a thing, he said that no one can use OS 9, and half the machines can't run OS X. Then he said that they could have spent the money on new Macs that can run OS X, but "UNIX isn't secure", he called it grbage compared to WinXP Pro.

One month later, they still can't get half the Dells that they bought to print to the right printer. Plus, it takes between 5 and 15 minutes to log on to the machines, and just as much time to log off. That leaves between 30 and 10 mins per period to do work.
 
Originally posted by crazy_will
My school is presently switching from Macs to PCs. When I asked the head tech guy why they were doing such a thing, he said that no one can use OS 9, and half the machines can't run OS X. Then he said that they could have spent the money on new Macs that can run OS X, but "UNIX isn't secure", he called it grbage compared to WinXP Pro.

One month later, they still can't get half the Dells that they bought to print to the right printer. Plus, it takes between 5 and 15 minutes to log on to the machines, and just as much time to log off. That leaves between 30 and 10 mins per period to do work.
Click to expand...
That's sad. What does the SA have to say now?
 
In Los Angeles, Apple Education is of course recommending that K-12 schools move to Mac OS X, but there is a major roadblock. The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is recommending that schools stick to Mac OS 9 because LAUSD's own technical specialists are not yet up to speed on X.

This last summer, a middle school near me went against the tide and installed (with my help as a volunteer) a new computer classroom with iMacs running Mac OS X and a Mac OS X Server, replacing a Mac OS 8-based classroom. It took many calls to Apple experts before we could get network login (with home directories on the server) to work under Mac OS 10.1, we had to contact a number of software vendors for help with use of X-based applications on the network, and we had various other problems that we had to research and solve ourselves. LAUSD provided help with the room's electrical upgrade, but no computer help.

Without expert help from volunteers, the school would not have been able to make this transition. I hope LAUSD gets their Mac OS X support in place soon because not many schools will take the "pioneer" approach without school district support.
 
our school still uses os 8.1/8.6 :(, even on the new macs they set it to os9 instead of osx
they wont be switching any time soon
yikes...most of the macs in the school are either old "all in one" powermac g3s or pre g3 all in one powermacs...:eek:
 
Originally posted by crazy_will


SA? I'm not quite sure what that means.
Click to expand...

System Admin - Maybe not the proper term for the technical person at your location.

Originally posted by Doctor Q
Without expert help from volunteers, the school would not have been able to make this transition. I hope LAUSD gets their Mac OS X support in place soon because not many schools will take the "pioneer" approach without school district support.
Click to expand...

I'm a little surprised that your school jumped in at X.1. I would have waited until I heard that the OS was up to snuff. I imagine OS X.2 would solve many issues, but I'm not sure if it does or not.

It would be great if someone in LA with OSX experience and very technical minded could offer their expertise. How would you find such a person? Maybe ask for volunteers through a school newsletter or the paper. If my child were at a school that had computer issues, I'd gladly lend my services.
 
Originally posted by SilvorX
our school still uses os 8.1/8.6 :(, even on the new macs they set it to os9 instead of osx
they wont be switching any time soon
yikes...most of the macs in the school are either old "all in one" powermac g3s or pre g3 all in one powermacs...:eek:
Click to expand...
You can throw OS X on the old G3's, but nothing before that. Same problem at my girlfriends school. Her students are on performa's etc. I don't see an upgrade for some time and that's why I think donations are important. Also people getting involved with the schools. A great way to show our support for our favorite OS.
 
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