National and Citrix will provide servers, server software, installation and technical training. In addition, National will send a master teacher to the winning school to provide a Global Connections Internet training course to help teachers learn to use the Internet effectively in their classrooms. Partnering with National Semiconductor and Citrix Systems to help teachers and administrators spend more time with students and less time trying to fix and maintain computers is a win-win for our whole community. With MetaFrame, schools can use a variety of existing device types, as well as new Windows-based terminals and other thin clients, to access the latest software programs. School Program manager for National Semiconductor.
Thin clients enable teachers to spend more time teaching rather than PC trouble-shooting.
School Program is specifically designed to free classrooms of IT maintenance and reduce the total cost of ownership and maintenance. A thin client is a desktop appliance with no hard drive, floppy drive, CD-ROM drive, or other moving components. The benefits of using a thin client system include significant cost savings, fewer IT staff, easy control of student access to applications by educators, reliable access to applications, and standardized applications on existing devices. We were able to expand our technology program with existing staff and to address the needs of our families who wanted to get online from home. We found that using thin clients to bring more technology into the classroom really did afford us the ability to change how students learn and how teachers teach.