The Green Campaign Giveaway winner gives their students access to more advanced technology without having to buy new machines

Due to budgetary issues in the Californian schools, Campbell Union School District was looking for affordable ways to replace their old computer hardware with new technology. Entering the Green Campaign contest gave them a potential way to do it.  After discovering that they won the contest, a decision was made to place the new computer lab into one of their schools, Monroe Middle School.

Their plan was to use their contest winnings to add additional student workstations.  The thin clients would replace machines that were 8-10 years old and unable to run applications desired by the teachers and students. By running Aqua Connect with the 10Zig thin clients, they were able to provide their students with the opportunity to use newer Mac machines without buying new Apple hardware. As an added bonus, replacing the older machines resulted in a significant power savings for the school district, which was a major concern for them.

Without much effort, Monroe Middle School was able to get both Aqua Connect and their 10Zig thin clients working rather quickly.  They installed Aqua Connect on their Xserve running Mac OS X10.5 server software. Their server hardware is running two 3.0 Ghz Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors with 8 GB of memory.  In addition to ACTS, they are also using Microsoft Office2008, Firefox and Safari software. They use their 10Zig thin clients to connect to Aqua Connect. All of the connections are local to the school site. 

They believe that using Aqua Connect would benefit some of their other schools that have similar computing needs. The solution has provided updated equipment, which saved them a significant amount of money since they no longer had to pay for maintenance on the older machines.  It has made the software update process much smoother, since they only have to update one machine versus all of the client machines individually.  Student reaction to the new computer lab has been very positive.  It has given the students the ability to interact with the same versions of applications available to them across the school site.

 “The Green Campaign from Aqua Connect and 10Zig has allowed our students to access additional electronic resources that we could not provide by other means. Thank you to Aqua Connect and 10Zig for this fantastic opportunity!”