back to article Microsoft to offer special Surface 3 for schools

Microsoft has quietly let it be known it's developed a cheap cut of the Surface 3 for schools. A brag post announcing a ten per cent discount for schools that purchase the typoslab, and bragging about how the device is empowering kidlets the world over, also slips in this nuggetoid of information: “In addition, we are …

  1. Mage Silver badge
    Mushroom

    Cloud?

    "but in these cloudy days it's not as if your kids are going to be suffering for lack of access to storage."

    What a lot of cloud hyping garbage.

    Of course you need a lot more storage than that, or it's just a terminal, like Chrome Book. Unless you have un-capped fibre connection (which isn't very portable outside your own WiFi) with redundant connection, you need your own storage, kids. too.

    Back to 1960s and central controlled storage eh?

    1. Simon Sharwood, Reg APAC Editor (Written by Reg staff)

      Re: Cloud?

      USB sticks. Cheap as chips. Not as tasty.

      1. stucs201

        Re: Cloud?

        Or a micro-SD card if you'd rather save the USB port for something else

    2. Thorne

      Re: Cloud?

      Seriously for schools, you can have a dumb terminal (chromebook) and use cloud based applications and cloud storage. The storage and applications could reside on the school server. Wireless on the school network would be perfectly fine

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge

        Re: Cloud?

        If you use cloudy storage and applications there's no need for a Surface. Something as cheap as chips will do because it's going to get battered to hell and there's nothing on earth that will survive that apart from an old Thinkpad.

        If you decide to go the USB stick route for extra storage there's also no need for a Surface either. The USB socket will probably end up knackered anyway.

        If schools are concerned about games, IM, and so on and they're insisting on BYOD with Windows then they least they could do is supply a CD which installs the required software and configures Windows so it doesn't run any old executable.

        1. Dave 126 Silver badge

          Re: Cloud?

          Yep, when I was in school in the mid-nineties, we each had our own storage on the server, and it was drummed into us that we only use local storage for the duration of a session before moving our files to the server. We would have had no need for a single Gigayte, let alone 20 - admittedly we weren't using video, but most school classes won't require that.

      2. dogged

        Re: Cloud?

        > Seriously for schools, you can have a dumb terminal (chromebook) and use cloud based applications and cloud storage. The storage and applications could reside on the school server. Wireless on the school network would be perfectly fine

        No you couldn't because schools have to account for kids who don't have the Intarwebz or even the Why Fies at home. A Chromebook will not cut it.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Cloud? @ dogged

          "No you couldn't because schools have to account for kids who don't have the Intarwebz or even the Why Fies at home. A Chromebook will not cut it."

          Well, Lee D's credentials are there to see, and indeed to judge from his long history of well informed posts. And your expertise in education is......?

        2. Roland6 Silver badge

          Re: Cloud? @dogged

          >>"because schools have to account for kids who don't have the Intarwebz or even the Why Fies at home."

          Not a problem! Just start from that assumption - the school my daughter attends did and it hasn't prevented them being consistently listed in the top 20 UK state schools. Also this stance hasn't prevented then from making full use of VLE, email etc. Yes having Internet access at home is a bonus, particularly gaining access to parental parts of the school's website, but you can manage without it.

          1. Danny 14

            Re: Cloud? @dogged

            32gb is a bit tight for windows though. After office a serif suite our school image is 20gb (after patching, office sp2 add 2gb)

    3. Lee D Silver badge

      Re: Cloud?

      I work in schools. I've done their IT for something like 15 years now.

      The schools won't care about client storage. You either store on a server, or you store in the cloud nowadays. And you're hardly storing anything anyway. The sum total work of a YEAR of kids will likely be a few Gigabyte unless you're storing lots of video - and the video you store will be all the intermediate work and not their final product.

      The magic words are "VLE". Everything is done with web interfaces and portals anyway, interfacing into user areas. Other schools use Google Apps for Education (which gives you UNLIMITED online storage for email and for Drive if you're a school). Most schools will have redundant broadband as an absolute minimum and leased line as standard. A lot of them host their own website in-house, for services like the VLE, OWA, etc.

      Yeah, sure, the net goes down sometimes, but it's not "business-critical" in that sense. You can do a few days without it just by saving locally, using the VLE internally, etc. but some of your outside services might suffer. And on leased line, a couple of days is the only outage you really see and you'll have broadband (or even 4G) backup for that. I've run a private school with 100s of machines, tablets and users from a bunch of 4G SIMs when our dual-ADSL2+ broadband contract was severed against our will. We got in another broadband line within the week and leased line in replacement within a couple of months.

      You know all those "bring your iPads to school" kind of places? How do you think they are operating? The cheap Wifi-only iPads (don't want to give the KIDS 3G because it has no decent filtering) are 16Gb and most of that can be used up with apps and the OS upgrades. They use the cloud offerings and the VLE etc.

      Your ability to teach is not hampered while the internal network keeps running. Your external services (submitting homework via Google Drive, or downloading the question sheet from your VLE) may be somewhat hampered but it doesn't take a lot to make them accessible from the world in an emergency.

      Hell, most places use software like ClarionCall (web-based messaging service for emergency emails/texts or even just sending the newsletter home), some use Office 365, a lot use Google Drive, remote-desktop, VPN, etc. It's not actually that crucial at all to have local storage.

      In fact, my deployment image - with every piece of software and every driver for every PC and laptop in school - is about 45Gb. And on most clients most of that is unused. The biggest things you'll ever deal with are roaming profiles but if you're deploying Surfaces and Chromebooks, etc. they have an entirely different use case anyway.

      There's no reason to need a lot of local storage in a school, or even a lot of RAM. The last year of so is the first school I've worked at that guaranteed 4Gb of RAM in every PC. And we run Windows 8. Properly managed, it's just not a problem even with a "login surge" every hour as one class logs out of every PC and the next class comes in and logs into every PC.

      And the amount of stuff you have to actually keep? Well, you submit that to the VLE from your Google Docs or whatever, and it gets stored in the server and backed up with your normal file storage. You aren't losing anything and don't need independent storage for everything.

      In fact, in my school, my first action was to ban USB keys. Rarely used, unreliable when heavily bashed about, a virus- and data-transferrence risk, and the cloud offerings we have do a better job for zero cost (I'm not issuing encrypted USB sticks to every member of staff just so they can take work home, and certainly not to every pupil).

      In computing everything comes in cycles, thin-client, fat-client, centralised, decentralised, etc. At the end of the day you use both and all in everything you do. Thin-clients logging into VM's or using cloud offerings alongside fat clients for "real" work with access to the same data.

      Site-wide wireless is the norm.

      Tons of on-site servers, storage and services is the norm.

      Redundant / resilient / leased lines are the norm.

      VoIP and even SIP is the norm.

      Cloud / Private Cloud (VLE) accounts are the norm.

      The pupils are more than welcome to take their own backups but, you know what, when all your stuff is mirrored to all the possibilities anyway, they never need to. Google Apps for Educations offers not only AD authentication sync but even storage sync and EU-data protection guarantees (a billion times more than Apple does). And if you think on that as "working" space, but then have an official portal to submit "recorded" work (homework, coursework, etc.) it really doesn't matter if the cloud goes down or the Internet goes off.

  2. GrumpyOldBloke

    My kid lugged a laptop to high school for a couple years under the schools new and exciting BYOD policy. Smart phones were bad, laptops were good. The school issued requirements and arranged special deals but had not stated what the educational outcomes might be. Laptops are now banned in most classes because the teachers, being on the wrong side of the screens, could not monitor their use (mostly game playing). Kids now use their smart phones to do research in class and sanity has prevailed. I do wonder how more Microsoft based ewaste might empower kids in schools - what are the educational outcomes that could not be achieved more cost effectively by other means? Is there an advantage in giving kids a god awful office suite so that they can cut and paste nicely formatted crap immediately or would it be better to give them non linear tools like pencil and paper and give them time and techniques to complete a task?

    1. Thorne

      "Kids now use their smart phones to do research in class and sanity has prevailed"

      I call BS.

      Kids are using their smartphones to message their friends in class while claiming research perhaps.....

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      This. We had a grade 7 kid here who managed to hack some expensive crap sold by IBM that was supposed to help teachers monitor kids (not sure what it's called, can't be arsed with Windows stuff, I just enjoy the stories).

      He used Linux and metasploit apparently. I was impressed. The kid got suspended and was banned from the lab. The powers that be weren't impressed that the million dollar software they had been conned into buying by the IBM and M$ salesmen could be circumvented by a 12 year old.

      If it were up to me, I would have taken him aside, gave him a pat on the back, and given him the "with great power comes great responsibility" speech. Instead, he gets a smack on the head for being smarter than the other kids, and gets sent home to come back after he has dumbed down.

      Not sure when the educators are going to grasp the fact that when it comes to technology, more money != better software != better education.

      1. Dave 126 Silver badge

        >Is there an advantage in giving kids a god awful office suite so that they can cut and paste nicely formatted crap immediately or would it be better to give them non linear tools like pencil and paper and give them time and techniques to complete a task?

        Like any tool, it depends upon how it is used. When I was in secondary school, we learnt the basics of engineering drawing by hand - fifteen years later, that same school room is filled with SolidWorks workstations. I only started using parametric CAD at university, though having the hand-skills was a good foundation.

        The technology that I feel really aided my learning in school was a Casio graphics calculator - allowing me to quickly visualise equations and thus understand calculus more easily. However, it was still useful for me to plot graphs by hand (something about doing a hand-eye task allows the brain to do things in the background).

        Windows isn't just Office. Most industry-standard software - in whatever field - is available for it.

  3. Anthony Hegedus Silver badge

    The kids might have access to fast broadband at home, tethering on the go and a decent battery life on these devices. And Microsoft's hyper-reliable "onedrive" cloud service never goes wrong does it?

  4. The FunkeyGibbon

    Back in my day...

    ...you were lucky if you got to the single Acorn rather than the BBC Micro machines in the class. These young whippersnappers have no idea how good they have it! #SeriouslyOldMan

    1. stucs201

      Re: Back in my day...

      I assume you mean Archimedes? The BBC micro was an Acorn.

      1. Richy Freeway

        Re: Back in my day...

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes

      2. Dan 55 Silver badge
        Windows

        Re: Back in my day...

        It might have been an Acorn Electron. Acorn probably didn't know how to get rid of the things after they failed to sell them in Christmas 1983 so they might have offloaded them onto schools cheap.

        1. Scott Broukell
          Meh

          Re: Back in my day...

          Luxury, bloomin' luxury I say. A slide rule was the most advanced piece of equipment in my satchel. It was (is) open-source, required no batteries, still works to this day (some 50 years later), and has never suffered malware infection or system corruption of any known kind. Storage - that's what yer grey-matter is for. Luxury!

          1. Paul Crawford Silver badge

            Re: Back in my day...

            Slide rule? Oh how we dreamt of a slide rule!

            That were luxury! We had to work with an abacus down t'mine and were beaten for 27 hours per day if you got it wrong! And you tell the kids today and they won't believe you...

            1. Roland6 Silver badge

              Re: Back in my day...

              Don't knock the slide rule! it is a very good tool and performs it's function very well. Additionally it does help to reinforce certain relationships between numbers, as it uses them in a very practical way.

          2. Vic

            Re: Back in my day...

            A slide rule was the most advanced piece of equipment in my satchel.

            I still use one.

            I also have one of these, but TBH, my eyesight struggles to cope in all but the best of lighting conditions :-)

            Vic.

  5. Hans 1
    Facepalm

    >Even with reduced on-board storage, 'the cloud ate my homework' isn't going to cut it

    No, certainly not, but 'That MS fucker forgot to renew the security certificate again, I could not access my homework anymore' will definitely work, how many times has it happened 2 or 3 years in a row ?

    Cloud is evil, cloud is evil ... google and MS clouds are even worse.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Terminal is right

    The chromebook storage model is exactly right - download files to work offline, but everything is synced to the cloud. Anyone using only local storage for work is insane. (app install and build directories aside).

    All I'm missing is automatic background snapshots of my revision controlled files.

    I assume people who are crying for more local storage only use it for apps, and have their source repos backed up on other servers?

    Portable devices must be regarded as transient storage because they are so easy to damage or loose.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    A "special" computer for those with "special" needs.

    1. Terry Barnes

      Like my quadriplegic son, do you mean? In terms of schooling we tend to refer to that as Special Educational Needs (SEN) - he's cognitively bright as a button but having limited arm and hand control makes traditional learning tools and techniques difficult to access.

      I could see him using one of these - he currently uses a touchscreen windows laptop at school and an iPad at home, but running accessibility software. With the right package the Surface could be adequate for his needs and easier to transport to and from school each day along with all his other kit.

      But that's not really what you meant is it? You just thought you'd try for a cheap laugh at the expense of disabled kids.

      1. Dave 126 Silver badge

        @Terry

        How well does that work for your son? Is there any obvious room for improvement, if so is it on the hardware or software side? I ask in the context of upcoming tech, such as eye and hand-tracking sensors from Leap, Intel and even Samsung, and improved speech recognition systems.

        1. Terry Barnes

          @Dave

          I think the hardware could be better - it tends to be mainstream stuff that's been adapted. That's clearly a good thing in terms of cost and supportability but you always get the sense that it's made to fit the need rather than designed from the ground up. Kids have big switches and joysticks and trackpads and the like depending on need but nothing I've seen really escapes the rectangle screen one foot from the face paradigm. I get that it's difficult though - everyone with these kinds of needs is unique and there's really not any one thing that will suit all people - but perhaps a suite of potential solutions that can be picked from and changed over time?

          There's a lot of great stuff going on with Microsoft's Kinect and I think that movement tracking is going to be key - more so for the challenges of life in general rather than specifically education but I think a fair amount of functionality is transferable. As he gets older (he's in reception year at school currently) I'm fascinated to see what might be possible with a network of Kinect like things around the house to turn lights on and off, open doors, move his hoist, all that stuff. Sometimes a touch screen might be ideal, sometimes it might be good to just say a command and move his arm or head or use his gaze. Time will tell!

  8. Montague Wanktrollop

    Not shiny enough

    Teachers and kids prefer shiny kit. Read Apple.

    MS will have a hard time cutting it with this. Even with the 10% discount it doesn't approach shiny territory.

    1. Tim Jenkins

      Re: Not shiny enough

      "...Teachers and kids prefer shiny kit. Read Apple..."

      As do the scrotes. Village primary round these parts was on the front page of the local paper with the kids proudly showing off shiny new iPads as generous donor shook hands with Head Teacher. Headline not long after was "School Burgled"...

      1. werdsmith Silver badge

        Re: Not shiny enough

        My 2 are at a school that has got a stack of Macs in the Art and Design, plus a few more in the music classes, but the vast majority are the Windows PCs of a bog standard in the way that only Research Machines can be bog standard.

        RM are still going strong and they do windows as well as Mac, so it really doesn't matter that the staff prefer shiny if County have got a deal with a Windows supplier based on budget.

        The school also have typing laptops for in class use, where somebody has broken their writing arm and can't use a pen.

    2. hplasm
      Devil

      Re: Not shiny enough

      "MS will have a hard time cutting it with this. Even with the 10% discount it doesn't approach shiny territory."

      Pricewise it does.

  9. David Roberts

    Chromebook?

    People keep trotting this out as a budget alternative.

    The only time I really looked I found two apparently identical bits of kit with same processor, memory, screen size and resolution. Only apparent difference was the lack of HDD in one.

    Virtually no difference in price either.

    So where the big saving?

    Or is MS now making Windows so cheap on that form factor that the expected saving from ChromeOS no longer makes a difference?

    Storage (non SSD) is cheap as chips these days.

    1. Paul Crawford Silver badge

      Re: Chromebook?

      The big saving comes from the almost complete absence of malware for a chrome book, and the inability of BYOD style kids bringing them in infected with that, or other general crap that might be disruptive installed.

      1. Tom 7

        Re: Chromebook?

        Crouton? - though that's not so much disruptive as enabling.

    2. Maventi

      Re: Chromebook?

      "So where the big saving?"

      The big saving is in the sheer amount of time investment required to maintain Windows systems versus anything else in a school environment. Yes, Windows is great in corporate environments where you have AD, GPOs and all that to tie everything together, but I speak from real experience when I say that it all falls apart quickly in a school environment.

      That stuff takes real skill, time and effort to keep ticking and maintained, but schools don't have the resources needed to do all this. Add to that the fact that any non-Windows clients simply don't play along anyway and it all quickly turns into a waste of time.

      Teachers and kids just want to get on with stuff and this is where the simple stuff like iPads and Chromebooks absolutely shine. Throw in a bit of Google Apps or Office 365 (from experience both work equally well in this environment) and some low-cost endpoints and everyone is happy.

      In every school I've worked with, Windows desktops and laptops take significantly more effort (and therefore money) to keep running properly versus pretty much anything else, despite the often low up front cost.

  10. John G Imrie

    Micosoft gives

    Remember kids, the first one's free.

  11. Diogenes

    No interwebz for us

    For the third time this year our school has been without the interweb for a week- the 1st time a council road resurfacing project ripped out the fibre, the 2nd time the machine attached to the our end of the fibre carked it and it took a week to replace (despite HPs promise of same day service!), this week we had the equivalent of a force 2 cyclone dropping a tree into our server room on Tuesday, kit replaced late yesterday , but today something 100km away at head office broke which meant that any authorisation to G4Ed and O365 cloud were impossible. 25% of my students still have no power or phone & no mobile reception at home - yay put everything in the cloud.

  12. Tim 11

    windows updates anyone?

    I assume this is running full-fat windows rather than win RT. If so, 32GB is only enough to last for about a years worth of windows updates even if you don't install any local software or store any local data at all (some of my PCs have over 50GB in the c:\windows directory).

    This is a very short-sighted idea

  13. localzuk Silver badge

    Software storage space and Windows Updates etc...

    Not sure 32GB is going to be enough when you consider the size of some Windows applications. Ok, fine, the tablets aren't going to be running Solidworks, but Smart Notebook? Serif suite? It all adds up. Our standard image comes to well in excess of 30GB on top of Windows at our school.

    I just don't think this is a particularly sensible size. Especially when you consider how cheap flash memory is to manufacturers. But then, the size of storage in devices is a big point of contention - why are upgrades in SSD size from OEMs and the like so much more than the actual cost to them to make it?

  14. John Crisp

    As an employer I just wish the kids could a) read and write properly b) be able to perform basic maths accurately.

    Quote frankly most of them are fit for fuck all, let alone employment.

    Oh sure, they can do fancy powerpoints. They can 'do Word' allegedly, but usually can't.

    They are brought up on a diet of toys and apps , usually taught by people who haven't any more knowledge themselves and who have no real clue about what is required in the workplace, let alone any software outside of the M$ stable. Blind leading the blind and all hooked on the M$ mindset.

    They don't actually have a clue what they are doing with a computer, or what can be really achieved with one.

    Tablets are a complete waste of money and only there to make the school look good and suck up to the equally badly educated parents. Oh, and the teachers all want one for free.....

    Glad my brother, head of IT at a local seconday school with 1500 kids, was brave enough to tell the head and parents to shove it.

    Reckoned he has saved a fortune in costs... no broken screens or devices left at home....

    Quite honestly I am better off teaching new employees myself than having to retrain them.

    Even worse I am trying to find a young person to train as a office IT assistant.

    So you want a job in IT. So what experience have you got ?

    'Oh lots. I have my IT GCSE and used computers at home and school for years.'

    Waiting for stock response....

    'I can do Word. And that other thing with the boxes and numbers....'

    Can they code ? 'I can do Word'

    Know how to build a website ? 'I think I did it in Word once'

    Any idea what perl or php are ? 'Things you type in Word ?'

    If/Then ? 'If I go to the pub then my frag average drops'

    Ever heard of Linux ? 'Is that an app you run on a tablet ? Or something special on FuckBook ?'

    What's a terminal ? 'Something you get cash from ?'

    What does Ctrl+C do ? 'Secret code on my game box to tell my mate he is a c*nt' for missing a frag'

    What happens when you pull that cable out of the back of the computer and plug it into another socket on the wall ? 'I got detention'

    So actually you did nothing at school beyond fancy video presentations and messing about and spent all your time at home on an xbox or PS something ?

    'But I got Grade C..... That's a pass isn't it ?'

    I give up.

    1. localzuk Silver badge

      Funny really, you're commenting that teachers don't know what's needed in the workplace whilst yourself not knowing what being a teacher is like.

      Or to sum it up more accurately - what a pile of nonsense.

      Tablets are not useless, they have some great uses in education. The problem comes when someone buys into the sales drone's bullshit and buys them before actually having a need. Tablets are great in music and SEN. They're great as a "companion" device - so, for use alongside traditional materials and methods. No need for planners, calculators, printing periodic tables, handing out homework, booking an ICT suite to allow your class to do some research on a topic, etc... The question is value for money - all those things can be done without tablets, but do tablets do it better, cheaper and more conveniently? I'd say that with recent cheaper X86 based tablets coming out that they absolutely do.

      ICT as a subject has been a joke for over a decade. When I took it, it didn't tax me as a student a single time. That's why the government and industry are trying to reform it into something useful - which takes time.

      Teachers have a difficult job, and people like you don't make it any easier.

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