Top ed-tech news: August 2012

Here are some of the top educational technology stories in the July/August edition of eSchool News.

The FTC appears ill-equipped to guard students’ electronic privacy; schools need more broadband capacity to realize the benefits of technology, a recent report argues; and a new tablet from Microsoft aims to compete with the iPad where it’s most vulnerable, which is content creation: These are among the top educational technology stories in the July/August edition of eSchool News.

Our July/August edition is now available in digital format on our website. You can browse the full publication here, or click on any of the headlines below to read these highlights:

FTC ill-equipped to guard ePrivacy…Read More

‘Data center in a box’ could ease virtual computing

The product "makes the architecture—for storage, for virtualization—much simpler than … what everyone else is doing," one beta tester said.

Managing a virtual computing environment can be challenging for school technology departments, which traditionally have had to buy separate servers and software and then piece everything together—often with a limited budget and staffing. Now, a new disruptive technology aims to help schools and other organizations cut costs and streamline the deployment of virtual computing by combining servers, storage, and virtualization in a single box.

The new product, HC3 from Scale Computing, converges all of these elements—servers, storage, and virtualization software—in one stack. Currently in beta testing and expected to be released later this summer, the product reportedly will enable school technology staff to set up and provision multiple virtual machines and assign software, memory, and storage from a single, eRate-eligible device.

As educators become more dependent on systems such as gradebook software and online assessments, any failure of those systems can cripple a school’s function. To safeguard against losing important data, school technology departments often set up multiple server systems so that if one server fails, all the information it contains will move over to another server. But more data requires more servers, and more servers come with increased maintenance needs.…Read More