Enabling Learning from Anywhere as Delta Variant Surges

Everywhere you turn this past week you’ve likely seen headlines about the challenges schools are facing as they revise their back-to-school strategies due to the Delta variant. This opening paragraph of a Politico article offers a brutal summary:

“School boards are at war with governors over masks. Superintendents are developing contingency plans on the fly. And schools that only just opened have had to shut down. Welcome to sophomore year for Covid-19.”

If you’re reading this, you’re likely in the trenches right now looking for solutions. If any of the following situations sounds like something you’re dealing with, we can help – and we can help fast:

  • If you need to give your students access to software from anywhere and on any device so that their learning isn’t interrupted if they have to learn from home again…
  • If you’ve attempted to use virtual desktops (VDI/DaaS) to enable remote/distance learning, but the cost and complexity was too much to manage…
  • If you have legacy software that only operates on Windows PCs in your designated PC labs, which you now want to make available on Chromebooks and other devices so students can have access to software on their own schedules, or…
  • If you want to eliminate your PC labs altogether to save cost and to give every student access to software on their own schedules…

If any of the above apply to you, Cameyo’s Virtual App Delivery platform can help you accomplish all of these goals, just like we have for more than 50 school districts in the last school year alone. We know that your students still need access to critical Windows applications – everything from AutoCAD to Adobe Creative Suite to Microsoft Office – even when they’re learning from home, and that many of those students don’t have a Windows PC they can access them from. We know that PC labs are costly and limiting in the COVID era, and we know that the cost, complexity, and security concerns of VDI & DaaS keep you up at night. 

Rather than tell you all the ways we think Cameyo is better (so much simpler, much more cost-effective, far more secure, and completely flexible), let’s have some of our school district customers do the talking:

Providing a Cost-Effective Alternative to VDI and DaaS

“We had been using VMware, but the cost was prohibitive, especially for widespread remote learning. We needed a cost-effective alternative that would enable us to provide all of our students with access to all of the apps they need – including legacy Windows apps – from their Chromebooks. Cameyo not only saved us a ton of money compared to VMware, but it is incredibly easy to manage, and is more secure. This works better than anything we’ve ever had, and Cameyo is now going to play a key role in our long-term plans for moving everything to the cloud,” said John Cerio, Network Administrator at Baldwinsville Central School District. 

Eliminating the Learning Curve for Distance Learning

“COVID-19 has forced school districts to deliver instruction differently. For Staunton City Schools, this meant we needed a realistic plan to deliver Windows applications to students using Chromebooks at home. Cameyo has delivered every step of the way, and our students are now successfully accessing all of their applications from home – simply and securely – with Cameyo! The setup and deployment of Cameyo was quick, and the user experience for students is excellent. Students still get access to the full desktop version of the software they’re used to, just running in a browser, so there’s no learning curve. Also, Cameyo’s support team was great throughout the process – they have continued to follow through for us and didn’t abandon us after the deployment went live,” said Tom Lundquist, Director of Technology at Staunton City Schools.

Extending the Value of 1:1 Programs with Access to All Apps

“As the San Diego Unified School District entered into plans for online learning to begin the 2020-2021 school year, the College, Career and Technical Education department was committed to finding a solution to continue to provide students with access to the industry-standard software they need for their courses. The district moved to a 1:1 device strategy to provide all students with a device for online learning, which included Chromebooks. Cameyo provided the solution we needed to make the critical software available to students on any device through the browser, and Cameyo’s ease of use and cost-effectiveness have been critical to our ability to enable these distance-learning efforts,” said Sarah Vielma, Director of College, Career, and Technical Education at San Diego Unified School District.

Eliminating PC Labs

“The ability to deliver these legacy applications on any device, not only on these old machines, is huge. Now our students have access to these apps all the time, from anywhere. Now we can actually grow our legacy application support and offer new courses for those apps – like teaching kids basic Excel and PowerPoint skills – because we don’t have to maintain a PC lab in order to offer those courses,” said Josh Finn, CTO at Homer Central School District. “Plus we don’t need a $35,000 lab to host it. But there are also unquantifiable benefits that are just as important, like being able to tell a school principal that we can now set up new courses for them without having to set up costly new labs.”

If your school and/or district is working to provide simple, secure, and cost-effective access to critical applications on any device to enable remote learning, Cameyo can help. You can get started in minutes with your free trial here, or book a demo and our Cameyo for Education team will be in touch quickly to help get you up and running.