La Mesa-Spring Valley School District is a K-8 district located in the East County of San Diego. District-wide there are approximately 1,600 workstations running on a Novell core network. Though Windows workstations are used by administrative staff, Macs are used for educational purposes by students and teachers. La Mesa-Spring Valley IT staff found that the teachers often wouldn't know how to rectify user-created difficulties or, if they did, would spend more time fixing the problems than teaching - a situation that didn’t work for either teacher or students. A computer could easily be out of commission for a week.
The IT staff at the La Mesa-Spring Valley School District deployed Deep Freeze on their Mac OS X systems. The teachers could easily rectify the problems in the systems with a simple reboot. Any unwanted changes by the students were also erased with a simple reboot. With Deep Freeze, they could also map folders so students could save data to the appropriate location.
La Mesa-Spring Valley School District Looks to Deep Freeze Mac to Control OS X
by Maryam Mahjoub
La Mesa-Spring Valley School District is a K-8 district located in the East County of San Diego. At the time that La Mesa-Spring Valley was transitioning to Mac OS X, the Information Systems (IS) staff realized that, though the operating system offered an environment that was more “kid-proof”, there were still general worries with regard students “explorations” and general OS integrity. They needed to find a solution that would control OS X far beyond their existing tools.
“Middle-schoolers are notoriously mischievous when it comes to computers,” said Richard Ribley, a Support Technician at La Mesa-Spring Valley. “They like to change things just because they can, whether that means taking items off the Dock, moving files to different locations or changing the toolbar in an application like Word. This would, of course, screw up the machine for the next person or even for the same person coming back to that machine later.”
The school district came across Deep Freeze for Mac and decided to evaluate the software. for two months. Ribley immediately liked what he saw. There was an ongoing interest by the IS Department in any product that could provide a solution to better control OS X.
“I sold the concept to the rest of the department, for both our Macs and our PCs,” said Mr. Ribley. “Once I was able to show how Deep Freeze could easily save us time and IS hours at a relatively low cost, it didn’t take long for management to see the program’s value. We had a desperate need for system integrity and Deep Freeze satisfied that need. ”
“It’s great that I am now able to say ‘Just restart it!’ to a teacher having difficulties with a Mac,” said Mr. Ribley. “We’ll continue to use Deep Freeze for as long as we can.”
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