The Education Appliance eA60/eA100

The Education Appliance eA60/eA100 is an industry leading platform that supports and enhances 1:1 learning in schools. The eA60/eA100 supports up to 100 students.

The three key functions supported by the Education Appliance are:

1. Learning
2. Networking
3. Administration

Learning

Learning and collaborative learning are provided by the Education Appliance using blogs, wikis, and other such shared applications. Content created as a result of such collaboration can be stored on the Education Appliance as well.

Third party applications that enable sharing (such as interactive white boards) for instance will also be supported.

Learning or Course Management System (LMS)

A virtual learning environment to create effective online learning sites as well as tracking schedules, timetables, class information etc.

 

Learning Activity Management System (LAMS)

Designed for managing and delivering online collaborative learning activities. Provides highly intuitive visual authoring environment for creating sequences of learning activities including a range of individual tasks, small group work and whole class activities based on both content and collaboration.

 

Class/School Conferencing System (SCS)

Allows delivering synchronized live presentations, whiteboards and web pages and share their voice and video on a local network or between remote locations (e.g. over the Internet).

 

Print Server

Available with USB attached printers; allows all students to share common printers.

 

Shared Storage

Personal and shared folders (documents) are available for students and teachers, with appropriate security and space assignment.

 

Networking

The eA60/eA100 supports comprehensive voice, data and video communications between a student and teacher, and amongst the students, both locally and remotely.

Connectivity

Wireless connectivity between the Education Appliance and the student laptops using either the built-in access point or an external access point. WiFi Access Controller, Ethernet 10/100/1000 Mbps

 

Internet Access

Internet access and Proxy services.

 

Unified Communications

Unified communications that can support voice telephony (IP PBX), email, video, instant messaging, websites and blogs.

 

Routing

Routing between the Education Appliance and external destinations over the Internet. Other items such as DHCP are also provided.

 

Quality of Service

Establishing quality of service (QoS) as well as other functions such as web caching that would significantly improve end user experience (due to speeding up access to remote content).

 

Administration

The Education Appliance provides a host of administrative functions through a simple, easy to use interface. All administration regarding networking and learning capabilities – such as usage, permissions, security etc can be supported. In addition, administration enables storing student information system.

Client PC Management

The ability to configure, view, update and delete OS image, user data, network profiles on client PC (student laptops) from a server management console.

 

Authentication

Authentication system for students, teachers and ‘guest’ users.

 

Security

Full security and firewall between the class infrastructure and the outside (between classes; or from the Internet/remote infrastructure).

 

System Backup

Automatic and/or manual system back up is available.

 

Asset Management System (AMS)

Gathering all system information (versions; releases; configurations) of the client laptops.

 

Student Information System (SIS)

Allows student specific information including demographic, class scheduling, performance transcripts, attendance and more.

 

Unified GUI Management

A simple easy-to-use interface to manage all service and functions remotely. GUI is available in English, German, Portuguese; Additional languages including Spanish, Italian and others will be made available shortly.

 

Full reporting system

Internet access, storage, printer and other shared resource usage can be monitored.

 

Benefits of using the Education Appliance

1. Significantly enhances the 1:1 educational experience

The Education Appliance often works in conjunction with student laptops (or similar devices). The student devices are often low cost, and low functionality devices with limited hardware/software support. Having these resources on the Education Appliance enables an optimal (low cost, high functionality) solution and ultimately, a better learning experience.

2. Improved economics for mass deployment

An extension of the benefit note above - enhancing the learning experience, is the fact that now expensive resources are only required on the Education Appliance instead of each student device; this makes the solution significantly inexpensive – optimized in fact, which is a pre-requisite for making mass deployment feasible.

3. Broadest feature set

There is no comparable product to the Education Appliance, and the breadth of functionality that it makes available is simply not available on a single platform.

4. Scalability and flexibility

The eA100 can scale from a very few (less than 10) to up to 100 students – which can support most classroom configurations. This is done without any changes to the platform and by simply (and remotely) adding the user/student licenses.

The Education Appliance can also be customized to support individual requirements. There is no requirement to use all the functionality on the platform (i.e. functionality can be selectively used), and further more, third party applications can be integrated on the platform as well.