October 2003 — Features
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Implementing a Mobile Lab in a Faculty of Education
Hardware. The hardware components in our configuration included a Bretford mobile cart, which has slots to store and recharge up to 32 laptops, as well as a six-wheel design that is easy to move from room to room. The cart is loaded with 32 Apple iBooks that have AirPort cards for wireless networking.The laptops are fully charged overnight, and as long as we allocate at least one hour of charging midday, we can use the cart throughout an eight-hour day.
The Mobile Lab features an 802.11b-compliant Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station, which provides wireless network access within a perimeter of about 150' - more than adequate for any classroom in our building. Our network security is configured in such a way that it is virtually impossible for anyone else except those with laptops associated with the cart to gain access. Finally, our lab includes an HP LaserJet 1200n Ethernet laser printer and an NEC LT260 projector.
Software. The software installed on the iBooks is a set of multipurpose tools commonly used in education: Microsoft Office for Mac OS X, Internet Explorer and Netscape Web browsers and plug-ins, Adobe Acrobat Reader, telnet and FTP programs, Inspiration software and LXR*Test. In addition, the laptops came standard with AppleWorks, QuickTime, iMovie, iPhoto and iTunes.
Currently, we maintain an extra iBook as a software master image, and periodically (when updates are required) we manually re-image the set of laptops. In the future, we plan to put a method into place for re-imaging all the laptops simultaneously over a wired network - the process would be much too slow over the wireless network. When students or instructors use the laptops, they logon with a default user account that prevents them from permanently altering the disk image, except for a "scratch" hard drive partition in which they can save files on a temporary basis. For long-term storage, students are required to FTP or e-mail their files to another location.
Physical and network security. When not in use, we keep the mobile cart in a locked secure area. The proctors help ensure the physical security of the Mobile Lab by monitoring its equipment when it is in a classroom. As the laptops are signed out to students in a class, we record their student ID information. At first, we were using a manual log sheet to do this, but we are now implementing the use of a mobile barcode scanner to streamline the process by scanning the barcode-enabled student ID cards, which are standard for all students at this university. All students are required to enter their university login ID and password to authenticate their access to the Internet, as is the case in the fixed labs.
Classroom Integration
The Mobile Lab has been used in a variety of situations with our faculty, mainly in undergraduate classes, but there has also been some use in graduate studies and for meetings. This lab is just one aspect of the overall technology plan for the faculty, and a critical component is that we have resources in place for supporting instructional use of the lab.
As Varvel and Harnisch (2001) said, it is essential to have a support system to ensure technical functionality and provide instructional support for instructors and students so that the computing environment is used effectively. We were careful to have those elements in place before the Mobile Lab was used in classrooms. The following sections describe some of the recent uses of this technology.
