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HP just announced the release of their new Z Workstation series, the Z800, Z600 and Z400. Here's a video showing how HP's workstations are in use in a pretty amazing Colorado high school program at Smoky Hill High.
Acer's new X270 desktop series was released yesterday. This compact little number is housed in a 10 liter case, small enough to fit into tight spaces, but it includes performance features like an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, up to 4GB of RAM, up to 500 GB hard drive, SuperMulti drive, Windows Vista Business, NVidia GeForce 7100 graphics card, an HDMI port and a whopping nine USB ports. All starting at $399 for the CPU, monitor sold separately. Seems like a solid and affordable choice for administrative and office purposes in particular, providing a lot of powerful essentials without the unnecessary stuff that you don't need and don't want to pay for. Acer has offered to send me one so I'm looking forward to checking it out soon, there might even be a video in the future...
I know you're probably familiar with the U.S. Department of Energy and Discovery Education, but in case you've never heard of the X Prize Foundation, it's a design competition organization, the automotive prize of which is sponsored by Progressive Insurance, with $10 million going to the team that can design, build and bring to market a practical car that gets at least 100 mpg, and then race cross country this year and in 2010.
The partnership these three have formed now has a new educational Web site launched recently, FuelOurFutureNow.com. The press release claims the site:
"...is an empowering resource that engages students in the science of alternative fuels and energy-efficient engineering. Featuring targeted curriculum and lesson plans for all grade levels, as well as high-quality video, dynamic interactives and additional resources from the United States Department of Energy, teachers can use the online knowledge center to achieve their science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) goals."
Looks pretty snazzy, including videos, pictures, activities and the like for K through 12. Maybe some of your students will get inspired and one day help save our dismal, uncreative and pathetic auto industry....
Back in November I wrote an article about touchscreens in education, and since I started researching for that piece I've paid a lot of attention to this trend because it's just so fascinating. The much buzzed-about Amazon Kindle 2, while not technically a PC or having a touchscreen, is part of the larger trend I think because of it's tablet design; you hold it like a book or magazine instead of how you hold a laptop.
Convertible tablets will also be a big thing in education, like the next-generation Intel Classmate design, and the rumors are, Apple will be releasing a touchscreen MacBook model, perhaps even a screen-swiveling convertible tablet design, which would be really cool but I will bet it will be pretty pricey for many schools to consider for one-to-one programs. Who knows though? Apple is notoriously tight-lipped about such things.
Fujitsu just sent me one of their tablet PCs, I hope to do a video profile of it coming up soon. Their model isn't durable or inexpensive enough for student use in my opinion, but I think it would be a great tool for administrators. More on that later.
Tablets and touchscreens are continuing to pop up everywhere! And there is a converging with the netbook trend as well I think, all three are becoming one: small convertible laptop tablets. And it's all driven by the needs of education.
Canon announced its first ever portable LCD WXGA resolution (1280X800) model, this sleek little number named the LV8300. That widescreen resolution allows you to display full 16:10 widescreen content in all its glory, which includes not just movies but also many computers and laptops in particular. This model also throws out a solid 3,000 lumens of brightness, a built-in carry handle and comes in at just 7.3 pounds, which is pretty amazing for this level of brightness. Two other identical looking projectors were released at the same time, both XGA but one with 3,000 lumens and the other with 3,500. The other amazing thing is the list price for the LV8300, just $1399, so I would bet you'll be able to find it under $1k before long from a reseller. For this feature set, that's a great value. See more Canon projectors here.
I received the press release about this new Sanyo projector model today and wondered: "Is this relevant to education?" At first I thought probably not, but.... perhaps in a big auditorium/lecture hall? If anyone out there is fortunate enough to have the $22k (not including lens) lying around and would like to outfit a really big room with a bright projector that provides true, full HD resolution (1920x1080), well then I'd like to shake your hand. And introduce you to this gigantic bad boy that could make all those dreams come true. 6500 lumens, single chip DLP with two color wheels, and Sanyo's Active Maintenance Filter system, which the company claims will last a whopping 25,000 hours of use.
Wowsers. Not a unit for Ms. Henderson's interactive whiteboard in the third grade, but like I said, if you're looking for something to show films or give presentations in HD to a room of a few hundred people, this could be your guy. Or you could just look at it and drool. Whichever.
I've been receiving a lot of press releases announcing different software titles becoming finalists in the 2009 SIIA CODiE Awards Education category. The finalists were selected by SIIA judges, and the second round of voting, this time by SIIA members, begins March 16th. The final winners are announced at a big gala on May 5. Just a few of the Education finalists include:
Discovery Education Science
School Improvement Network's PD 360
Kidspiration 3
Psychological Software Solutions' Review 360
DDI's Help Math
For all you happy hipster Mac users out there--and I know many districts are Mac exclusive--Apple has released more powerful, more energy efficient and more aggressively priced models of the iMac and Mac mini. Makes sense in an historic recession, higher priced brands like Apple have to slash prices or really take some serious losses.
For the same $1,499 price as the previous generation 20-inch iMac, the new 24-inch iMac delivers a 30 percent larger display, twice the memory and twice the storage. Delivering up to five times better graphics performance, the updated Mac mini now features the same groundbreaking NVIDIA GeForce 9400M integrated graphics introduced with the aluminum unibody MacBook family. And, Apple is claiming the Mac mini is the "world’s most energy efficient desktop," as it draws less than 13 watts of power when idle.
The Mac Pro, on the other hand, is a staggeringly powerful beast that uses the fabled, mythical Intel “Nehalem” Xeon processors and a next-generation system architecture to deliver up to twice the performance of the previous generation, and starts at $2,499, $300 less than prior generations. Pretty sweet.
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