eLearning Chinese Studio Enhances Multimedia Learning experience for Students

	About Customer
	School Name: eLearning Chinese Studio	Models Used: DS210j
	Why eLearning Chinese Studio chose Synology DiskStations Easy to use Easy to Manage with ACL (access control lists) Simplify Backups
"I'm really happy with the Synology DiskStation... It's made learning Chinese a lot more flexible for the kids." - Monica Sung, Managing Partner

The Program

The eLearning Chinese Studio in Bellevue, WA was founded to provide a nurturing and immersive environment to teach Chinese to Children. The studio uses Montessori techniques for the younger children. The older children utilize IQChinese software for interactive multimedia lessons. The curriculum is designed to build the students’ self-confidence as they progress, which helps to support a love of learning that follows them beyond the classroom.

The studio offers small classes for groups of children from preschool age on up. Children have the opportunity to take part in summertime Chinese Language Immersion camps. The emphasis is that children will learn by living the language.

The Challenge

The older students use computer software to provide multimedia exercises and testing as they continue to learn speaking, listening, and reading skills. The studio needed personal folders for each of the students to which the teachers would also have access. It would be here that the assignments would be placed and accessed.

A small business, the studio does not have an IT department, so the solution needed to be easy to set up, configure, and manage. It was necessary that the privileges could be set such that the teachers and individual students would have exclusive rights to their assignments. Monica Sung, a managing partner of eLearning Chinese Studio, needed a solution that would simplify and save time.

She had previously assigned each student to a computer and loaded their assignments to their respective workstations. This required that each student use the same computer each time. The students, however, wanted greater flexibility in their seating arrangements. Monica needed a way to give the students access to their folder and only their folder without tying them to a specific workstation.

The Solution

A friend of Monica’s suggested that she look to Synology for a solution. After speaking with one of Synology’s product specialists, she decided on the DS210j 2100, an economical DiskStation pre-installed with two 1TB drives in a RAID 1 configuration. The DiskStation arrived configured and ready to drop into her network.

Within minutes of unpacking the DiskStation, she was ready to begin setting up user accounts for the students and teachers. By using the User Home function in DiskStation Manager (DSM) 3.0, she is able to create a private folder for each of the students with just a few clicks. After adjusting the privileges, the teachers can access all of the students’ home folders, and the students were limited to their home folders. By centralizing the storage on the DS210j, the students were free to move from computer to computer, their files available at any of them.

"I’m quite happy with the Synology DiskStation," says Monica. "It’s made learning Chinese a lot more flexible for the kids. Now, the teachers can drop the kids’ assignments in one public folder and then collect the results."

By taking advantage of the ACL support in DSM 3.0, ownership and permissions are retained even as the files are passed back and forth between the DiskStation and the work stations. This helps the teachers to discretely maintain security so that answered homework doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

The DiskStation provides an additional benefit in that it has simplified her backup strategy. By storing the students’ assignments in a central location, she no longer needs to run backups from each of the individual workstations. Rather, she can use the easy Synology Backup Wizard to create a single backup job to a USB disk.

The eLearning Chinese Studio continues to help children develop tools that will serve them as they grow; from an understanding of Chinese language and culture, to a lifelong joy in learning. Synology is proud to help as Monica and her team guide and nurture their students.