An Apple a Day
Cricklade College Has just purchased 10 new Mac Pro Computers for its multimedia and film students. MacWarehouse asks why they chose to use Apple Macs.
Cricklade College is a Further Education community college based in Andover, Hampshire with around 750 full time and 4,000 parttime students. The college runs creative and performing arts courses, among others, and offers comprehensive resources and facilities such as a full recording studio, access to a live commercial theatre, a photographic dark room, ceramics studio with pottery kilns – as well as a full G5 Mac suite.
Dean Palmer is the ICT Services Manager for the college and he has just purchased 10 new Apple Macs for his students. We asked him why he had chosen Macs over PC’s?
“We have a mixed environment of PC and Macs and plan to keep this set-up. The decision to use Macs this time was based on the reasoning that many of the employers that students would encounter after leaving college would use Macs. This would then give them experience using industrystandard equipment.” Apple has been working with educators since the early days of the PC and its tools are known for being accessible and easy to use. Choosing to use Apple Macs supports the curriculum for using creativity in the classroom: “Using the Macs enables our students to maximise their potential by interacting with the bespoke software on the Macs, to produce unique and individual pieces of work,” explains Dean.
“The students will be using the Macs to aid in design and creation of multimedia projects in BND Multimedia and Film Studies.” It is important for students of any age to be able to think creatively and for schools and colleges to tap into and encourage this natural resource.
We’ve got the power Cricklade’s 10 brand new computers are all Apple Mac Pro workstations: “These are running Mac OSX and CS3 Design Premium Suite of applications, Final Cut Pro, Toast 8 Titanium, and MS Office 2004 for Macs,” Dean continues. With the introduction of Parallels software, it is now possible for us to run a Windows operating system on a Mac. It’s like having two computers in one as you can use both the Apple operating system ‘Tiger’ and Microsoft Windows on the same computer by using Boot Camp or Parallels. This saves space on the computer and offers extra flexibility when working in a classroom environment. “We will be using cross platform technology to allow our Macs to interact with our domain and access the available network resources.
We will be using ADmitMac to achieve this flexibility,” says Dean. ADmitMac enables Macs to be managed like Windows clients. The college has yet to use its new computers as Dean has not had the time to install them, but he says: “We will be installing the software ourselves and we cannot foresee any major issues. We have carried out that kind of operation many times before.”