Stretch Your Network

Thin clients may be the perfect solution for many schools' ever-growing computing needs. Small, inexpensive alternatives to their more temperamental and costly cousins—full-fledged computers—thin clients offer schools and libraries more bang, or workstations, for their bucks. In a thin-client network, each student has access to a monitor and keyboard, which are connected to the school's local area network through a small box, the size of a textbook, called a thin client (or as it's more formally known, a "thin-client appliance").

Why are thin clients so cheap? For starters, they use a less expensive processing chip than the family of Pentium chips currently favored by more sophisticated computers that run complicated software. Thin clients also have no hard, floppy, or CD-ROM drives. All of their computer processing—retrieving files, running software applications, accessing the Internet—is managed by a clever, state-of-the-art server located in another part of the school. Since thin-client boxes are so simple, they require little maintenance, freeing up technicians to manage their servers and networks from a single location. A thin client costs approximately $500, or half the price of a conventional computer, and one-third the price of a laptop.

The benefits are obvious for school librarians, particularly at a time when most media specialists wish their libraries had more workstations. If thin clients are so terrific, why doesn't every school and library have them? Part of the reason is that they weren't as easy to set up and use when they debuted five or six years ago. Plus, many school technology coordinators were reluctant to make radical changes in their standard computer-based school networks; they were also mistrustful of simultaneously running applications for 20 or more terminals on one server. With Web-based library automation systems in their infancy and CD-ROM-based databases more common than the Web-based versions, thin-client networks frequently had problems sharing CD-ROMs among 20 or 30 potential users. The hurdle was trying to place technology that didn't want to be networked on a network. "Sometimes CD-ROMs just don't play well with others in a thin-client system," says Tushar Mutreja, senior marketing manager for Citrix Systems, a creator of software for thin-client systems. Many vendors also over- inflated the advantages of thin clients. "Some people overhyped it," says Dave Rand, director of marketing for Wyse Technology, which makes thin-client network equipment. "Now we have to convince people they make sense. But our sales are up 30 percent in the past year, and PCs have stagnated."

With most of their glitches behind them, thin clients are beginning to take off. Manufacturers are reluctant to release exact figures, but they report that sales of thin-client networks to schools increased by about 25 percent between the 2000–2001 and the 2001–2002 school years.

Lemon Grove School District, near San Diego, CA, is the district that many educational technology experts and vendors point to as the model for the thin-client-based "school of the future." Darryl LaGace, the district's director of information systems, says that "when the district first decided to use technology to help kids learn, our goal was a four-to-one ratio, students to computers. But now, with thin-client appliances, it's two-to-one." There are about 4,600 students in the K–8 district and approximately 2,500 thin clients. "The idea used to be that you bought the biggest and fastest device for each budgeted [workstation]. But with thin-client appliances, we've had a tremendous cost savings along with good, useful technology," says LaGace. "We didn't change our budget, but have twice as many [workstations] as we did when we were using full computers."

LaGace contends that five technicians can adequately care for the entire system. He personally oversees 42 servers that support a wide area network encompassing not only school machines but also another 1,000 thin clients that are leased or rented to local businesses and nearly 500 low-income families. (For $45 a month, very low-income families can apply for no-cost machines and high-speed connections from the district.) The full network, which is called Project LemonLink, was paid for with the help of more than $2 million in grants from the state of California and the U.S. Department of Education.

Unfortunately, as in many California school districts, Lemon Grove has no certified librarians. According to Barbara Allen, a former principal who is now Project LemonLink's director, the district is getting along just fine using media assistants in their libraries. "The kids still get read to; book ordering still goes on," she says.

Librarians, of course, take testimonials like this with a large grain of salt. Kathy Schrock, a well-known author and a technology administrator for the Nauset Public Schools in Orleans, MA, cautions that even with advanced technology, librarians are important. "The best of all worlds is a lesson planned and conducted, in part, by three certified individuals—the subject specialist, the computer technology teacher, and the library media specialist," she says.

A model of a district that uses thin clients and is librarian-friendly is the Chapel Hill (NC) School District. Tracy Weeks, the technology specialist at East Chapel Hill High School, says that one-quarter of the school's 400 computers were actually designed to be thin clients. She says that high school librarian Marilyn Mrozek has been particularly impressed with the greater access and stability of having a thin-client network. Most of East Chapel's thin clients, as in many of the districts that use them, are "legacy machines" —older PCs, such as first-generation Pentium PCs with only 16 MB of memory, that have been converted into thin-client terminals. "Because students are using server-based software, and they can log in to their files on the server through the thin-client network, many students have the same experience [as someone using a conventional computer]," explains Weeks.

Or almost the same experience, she cautions.

Although students can use thin clients to access many online library resources, there are still some materials they can't access. If you guessed that they're CD-ROMs, you're correct. Weeks says the Citrix software that runs the thin-client network requires Windows 2000. But many of the CD-ROMs in the library's collection —such as Great American Speeches —need to run in a Windows 95 or 98 environment. It's becoming less of a problem, however, because most reference resources are now accessed online. Another problem, adds Weeks, is that "the Citrix software isn't really meant for multimedia: animation and sound are often choppy." But, all in all, she says that using legacy machines has helped the school give students more workstations. "It's really enabled us to use our equipment longer," she says. For financially strapped schools and libraries, that can only be a good thing.