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At the end of the 2010-2011 school year, San Diego Unified School District, had 10,000 iPads in use and was set to add 18,000 more the next semester. Teachers and students were enthusiastic about using the devices yet the district faced a serious problem: Teachers were reporting to the instructional tech team that using Apple Configurator and mobile sync stations to add new content to 30 iPads at a time was not working well. Like San Diego, school districts around the country are realizing that managing tablets brings a host of new and time-consuming headaches. "T.H.E. Journal" interviewed several district tehnology leaders in charge of large tablet deployments about their deepest pain points during implementation, and this article discusses what they had to say.

In many ways, specialized computer labs are the black holes of IT organizations. Budgets, equipment, employees--even space itself--are sucked in. Given a choice, many IT shops would engage warp drive and escape their gravitational pull forever. While Captain Kirk might have looked to Scotty for a fix to the problem, colleges and universities are increasingly relying on a solution that comes without the Aberdeen accent: virtualization. Virtualization gives institutions the ability to deliver the benefits of a computer lab--even specialized labs for disciplines such as computer science and engineering--to students anywhere without the hassles or expense. With demand for lab access increasing and budgets in a tailspin, more institutions are using software from vendors such as Citrix and VMware to reconfigure their servers and virtualize access to the applications in specialized computer labs. All the applications run on the campus' servers and can be accessed via a web browser from anywhere students can find an internet connection. (Contains 4 online resources.)