European educators recognise that information technology should be a core component in the education of younger children. But, traditional IT was letting teachers and students down.

Personal computers have proved to be increasingly unreliable in classrooms and costly to maintain. With school budgets constrained in most European countries, replacing obsolete PCs with the latest hardware able to run newer multi-media applications is hard to justify. Finding educational ICT that combines affordability with performance that supports ambitious e-learning is key.

In response forward thinking schools are embracing desktop virtualisation as the engine for ensuring more children have access to good e-learning tools that are affordable to buy and run. For example schools in the Netherlands and Germany are reaping the benefits of education ICT based on low cost high performance NComputing technology. Paulo Freire, located in Oosterhout, Netherlands provides primary education to children up to eight years old.

NComputing is enabling shared computing that means more children can access computers in classrooms at any one time, while reducing IT costs by 50% through less maintenance and using lower powered devices that consume less power. In Lunen, Germany, primary schools benefit from the local authority’s decision to implement desktop virtualisation across its schools. By choosing NComputing’s vSpace Server existing hardware could be re-used while new low cost, robust devices helped expand access to many more students with a reduction in IT operating costs.