Category: Desktop & Application Streaming

Amazon Web Services (AWS) made more than 140 announcements at re:Invent 2023. In this blog post, we’ll take key announcements from re:Invent and apply them to relevant K12 education use cases. From generative artificial intelligence (AI) to cost optimization, AWS can support your school, district, or educational service agency and enhance both the classroom and administrative experience. 

Career and Technology Education (CTE) programs like architecture, design, and digital editing can require significant computing power and high-end graphics cards. While many schools across the US provide students with laptops to provide access to web-based applications, these laptops often don’t have the computing power to support these types of programs. The East Central Ohio Educational Service Center (East Central Ohio ESC) addresses this issue for central east Ohio schools by using AWS. With the cloud, East Central Ohio ESC helps school districts save thousands of dollars, and in one case up to a million, providing students and teachers with the computing resources they need to succeed in their classes from anywhere.

How can schools make sure students have more equitable access to the real-world technology they need to grow skills in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)? The answer is Amazon AppStream 2.0, an application streaming service from AWS that lets users run any desktop application, on any computer, with the cloud. With access to high-powered programs and applications on any device connected to the internet, educators can provide career technical education (CTE) and STEM curricula to students anywhere, anytime. Find out the three ways that AppStream 2.0 improves the STEM classroom and more.

Geospatial datasets are increasingly large, reaching terabyte and even petabyte scale, which can cause many challenges for geospatial analysts and educators–but Amazon AppStream 2.0 can provide some solutions. In this blog post, we walk through how to deploy QGIS, a no cost, open-source geospatial information system (GIS) application used by geospatial analysts, in Amazon AppStream 2.0. We also load an example dataset to demonstrate how desktop GIS application users can access large, cloud-hosted geospatial datasets with high performance by keeping the data and compute components together on the cloud, and streaming the desktop application instead of downloading the data itself.

Higher education institutions that hadn’t previously considered the cloud prior to the pandemic are now investigating how to begin their cloud journey. In this blog post, we highlight some strategies and first projects to help higher education institutions get started with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud simply and efficiently. 

Higher education leaders agree the coronavirus pandemic forced many institutions to adapt and innovate. Which strategies worked? Which tactics didn’t? What role did cloud technology play? The AWS education team recently convened a small group of university leaders for a roundtable discussion to learn about how higher education institutions innovated to support learning, teaching, health and administrative processes, campus culture, and physical infrastructure.

With a recent feature release, Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers can now use CAC/PIV cards when using Amazon WorkSpaces to access government systems. Amazon WorkSpaces is a desktop as a service solution that helps users access all of their desktop applications from anywhere. This feature supports pre-session and in-session authentication.

With AWS Cloud-based solutions, Keele University in England is now able to meet students’ and prospective students’ admissions needs virtually. Prospective students from around the globe can now tour campus remotely, and students going through the confirmation and Clearing process (a period where UK universities accept students and fill remaining seats in their incoming class if a student has not matched with their preferred institution) have a more streamlined, efficient experience. To kick-start the university-wide digital transformation, the team decided to start with an immediate need: the admissions process.

As schools return for their academic years amid a global pandemic, many questions persist around how best to enable both teachers and students to learn remotely, including accessing materials and applications in a secure and suitable form. Similarly, staff and administrators must have a reliable system for handling confidential information. For some, the answer is found in VPN connectivity and VDI. Streaming applications over the internet instead of having them physically installed on devices and desktops can save costs and address security concerns. InterVision, AWS Partner Network (APN) Partner, helped one of their higher education customers quickly and securely scale remote application delivery to students and faculty using Amazon AppStream 2.0, a solution that provides highly available remote user access while reducing the management time and costs compared to traditional solutions.

For community organizations, government agencies, and educational institutions seeking to support a distributed workforce, citizenry, or student body with cloud capabilities, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has developed an online virtual booth to highlight remote work, learning, and call center use cases for the public sector. Learn how to connect your remote employees, constituents, or students on AWS by playing the AWS Cloud Champion: Virtual Workplace Interactive Challenge.