The challenge for St Peter’s Girls’ School was to provide a stable platform that enables Mac OS and Windows environments to co-exist, providing teachers the option to switch between operating systems seamlessly as needed.
St Peter’s Collegiate Girls’ School is an independent school based in South Australia. It offers South Australian Certificate of Education (SACE) as well as being an authorised International Baccalaureate (IB) World School teaching both the Junior School and the Diploma Program in Years 11 and 12.
Business challenge
St Peter’s Girls’ School is one of Australia’s most innovative girls’ schools, acclaimed for its academic excellence, caring atmosphere and strong community spirit. The school provides the highest quality education from Pre-School to Year 12 in a stimulating, caring and supportive environment.
Known for providing quality education, the school also maximizes each student’s learning potential by leveraging on IT as a teaching tool. In recent years, the use of Macs at St Peter’s Girls’ School has increasingly proved effective, both as a teaching and learning tool.
“The school’s growing Mac user base, the increasing frequency of use by staff, and the inevitable need to support Windows-based business critical applications had likewise increased management issues, causing tremendous strains on the school’s IT department,” St Peter’s Girls’ School Information and Communication Technology Manager, Nicolas Cronis, said.
“We needed a cost effective, easy-to-use solution to manage the school’s current stable of 100 staff machines running both Windows PC environment and Mac OS X® platform, without disrupting operations or draining resources. Also, as the school is expecting additional computers in 2015, scalability was also a critical requirement for us.”
The challenge for IT was to provide a stable platform that enables Mac OS and Windows environments to co-exist, providing teachers the option to switch between operating systems seamlessly as needed, enabling them to be as effective as they can be in doing their jobs – without being restrained by operating system and computing environment issues.
Solution
After careful evaluation of a number of similar solutions, St Peter’s Girls’ School chose to deploy Parallels Desktop® for Mac Business Edition, which allows teachers to run Windows and Mac applications seamlessly side by side without rebooting, thereby enabling them to provide a richer teaching and learning environment. A proven solution of choice for many of the world’s top educational institutions that have adopted a multi-platform approach, the Parallels solution also met the school’s other critical requirements, such as the scalability and stability of the platform.
“Parallels Desktop for Mac Business Edition is the ideal solution for educational institutions looking to adopt a multi-platform approach to teaching and learning,” Cronis said. “A stable, easy to manage platform that gives teachers the flexibility to run and switch between their Windows and Mac programs as needed without re-booting, it is an enabling tool for teachers that help increase their productivity and effectiveness in their ability to perform their jobs.”
Results
Parallels Desktop for Mac Business Edition enables teachers at St Peter’s Girls’ School to run both Windows and Mac OS X applications seamlessly without the need for IT intervention.
“With Parallels Desktop for Mac Business Edition, teachers at St Peter’s Girls’ School have never been more flexible in creating teaching aids that make teaching more fun, interesting, and effective,” Cronis said. “In addition to its reliable performance, the solution is easy to use, allowing files to be dragged and dropped across different operating systems.”
Parallels is delivering solutions that are facilitating a richer, more diverse teaching and learning experience for teachers and students, respectively. Parallels Desktop for Mac Business Edition features security management that allow the school’s IT administrators to have full control over device access by assigning specific rights to teachers. It also lets IT centrally configure and control what teachers can have on their Mac or desktop PC.
Following the introduction of Parallels Desktop for Mac Business Edition for teachers, St Peter’s Girls’ School is looking forward, hoping to extend the same deployment for its growing number of student Mac users, who also require access to Windows-based productivity applications.
