The success of St. Helens SNS’ Thin Client Solution in Primary SIP project (www.sip.ie) has spawned the more ambitious Hermes project. Hermes plans to wirelessly connect nine schools in Portmarnock, Killbarrack and Howth to a server farm at St. Helens, centrally providing broadband internet access, software applications, processing power and storage, thus removing many of the technical and infrastructural issues that historically have plagued technology integration in many primary schools.
Given the final green light by the Department of Education and Science in mid November 2003, the project has been in implementation and installation mode since that date. The broadband wireless links between all the schools are now operational at a speed of 13Mbit/s with a possible upgrade to 54Mbit/s if required.
The Server Farm consisting of 11 HP servers with twin processors and high speed storage is presently being commissioned and will be on stream for all nine schools after Easter. In addition, 30 network thin client computers will be installed in each school. These thin clients will access their processing power and storage needs remotely, keeping
maintenance of local machines to a minimum.
This project is of major significance because of the clustering and centralised model – a new departure for Irish schools together with broadband Internet connectivity and technical support provision. Tom McFadden, full-time project coordinator, outlines the benefits “All these elements should deliver a trouble-free and usable system to all the schools involved and should enable these schools to increase their usage and integration of ICT in the curriculum for their students.”
With over 100 teacher involved a major focus on training has been integrated into Hermes with a range of face-to-face and online training modules to be delivered to facilitate the needs of the teachers on the ground. Continuous thorough evaluation is planned of the technical aspects of the model as well as its pedagogical impact that will no doubt have a strong bearing on possible rollout of this model to other areas of the city and country.
15/03/04
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