24.7.10

Our Dream Computer Laboratory

My co-teacher and I are always working on how to maximize the space of our computer laboratory room, considering the number of students using the room. We plan and hope that it’s not just a dream; that this plan will not be forever just a hope but also be put into reality. At present we are still fortunate because we still have 15 “moody” computer units. “Moody” as it is noted because of the indications that these units are showing signs of malfunctioning like memory failure, death blue screen, hard disk boot failure, CMOS checksum error. So much effort have been made to at least prolong it’s use, these Pentium III with 800mhz of processor, 128 MB of RAM and 20 GB of HDD are still working after ten years.
In our eagerness to make our dream and hope a reality, we would be very glad and will appreciate all comments and recommendations you wish to share with us in this BlogSpot if you think we've forgotten something.
Should you wish not to be identified publicly, you can e-mail us your idea regarding our dream plans for our school computer lab. Here is our dream plan:
Computer laboratory:
We have 60 students per class, so we really would want to have a big computer laboratory room that can accommodate all of them without having troubles with chairs, tables, ventilation, a brand new and quality air-con to replace the old and “moody” air-con, cabinets for our instructional materials and the repair of our classroom windows.
Student Computer Workstations:
We are dreaming of a 1:1 computer unit per student, but because of our classroom size and air-con problem which we wanted to prioritize, we will put aside that ratio in our plan at this time. Here are the computer units’ specifications we are dreaming of for our class per student:
System Unit:
• Motherboard: with complete ports: Video-VGA and DVI/WLAN and LAN/Sound/USB/ etc. and will support core2duo processor
• Processor: Core 2 Duo
• Memory: 3 GB of RAM
• Hard Disk Drive: 1 Terabyte SATA type
• Optical Disk Drive: DVD RW SATA type
• Video Card with VGA, DVI and S Video port. 512 MB 64 bit of specification
• Wireless Network Interface card
Monitor: LCD Monitors 17” With VGA and DVI port
Keyboard: Wireless or USB
Mouse: Wireless or USB
Speakers
Headset
Web Cam
Workstation for teacher:
As of now, we bring our own laptops so we will not use the computer units intended to be used by our students anymore because we only have 15 computer units as I mentioned earlier. But we are still dreaming of a separate computer unit for us with the same specifications above. A laptop would also be a great one because we sometimes need to connect it to a projector for important lessons for a clearer view.

LCD Projector: We also wish that an LCD projector should be mounted on the ceiling permanently which is directly connected to one computer unit to avoid possible problems like broken VGA port. Because the more you move an LCD projector, the more it will be prone to parts malfunctioning.
Quality Laser Printer: We already have printers in our school and fortunately we have no problems with it. But a continuous supply of ink is a better one.
Software
Operating System:
• A windows 7 Ultimate version is much better but we also dream of having separate computer units with other operating systems like BAYANIHAN Linux, UBUNTU Linux and APPLE MAC OSX would be appreciated so our students could also be familiar with other O.S.

Application Software
We teach PC Operation, Computer Hardware and Servicing, HTML and Web Page designing enough to justify that we are in need of the following application/software:

• Microsoft Office 2010:
• MS Office FrontPage
• Adobe Photoshop CS4
• Adobe After effects
• Macromedia Dreamweaver
• Adobe PageMaker