[ubuntu-florida] who's using Edubuntu?

[ElementC]

I know that the following is probably painfully obvious, but heres all
the information I could gather on the subject:

1: Public schools in Florida all are required to go through their
district offices for any technological decisions. That means that
youre probably starting in the wrong place. However, if you metnion
that thin-clients are really cheap to the correct people, you might be
able to get them interested in a 15-20 workstation pilot test.

2: http://www.edubuntu.org/GettingStarted is the best place to look if
you;re just getting started. you might want to try getting that set up
so that you have something to show if you manage to get them
interested (a couple of pentium IIs running from your home desktop
would be good enough; it impressed my contact at the SBBC fairly
easily, {especially when I netbooted three library computers from my
laptop, but that's another story] and you can usually find a few
pentium IIs in their dumpsters).

3: Most of these tech experts are even more overworked than teachers,
try not to push them too hard on the first meeting. Also, don't expect
immediate large success, most of the larger school boards have signed
themselves over to M$ till xp freezes over.

4: About ninety seven percent of the computers in my school district
are donated Pentium III and IVs from NASA, running Windows 2000 pro.
Two percent are larger, fater-processored machines running Windows
2000 advanced server, and the remaining one percent are SLES 10.1 DNS
servers. The linking element: available commercial support. Don't
forget that Canonical does offer paid support of (ed)ubuntu servers
and desktops, for far less than M$ service. It may be a clenching
tidibit that you'll need later on.

5: Remember that XP end of life is approaching. Another tidbit that
may come in handy is their estimated budget to become vista-ready.
Count the number of existing computers and multiply by $1000 for a
rough estimate. Remember: edubuntu upgrades are free and supported
almost indefinitely, besides the usual benefits of dropping their
antivirus licenses.

6: No school board that I know of has formally attempted a linux
pilot. However, most have a few non-critical linux boxes kicking
around in use for robotics clubs, web design classes, and TV
production classes.

7: Private schools are already running mac OSX. It ain't broke so
don't fix it. Although, Christian private schools might be interested
in Ubuntu CE. Burn em' a copy and find out about it.

8: Welcome to the list!

Hope  I've helped in some small way.

Fondest Regards,

Casey 'ElementC' Doran,

Linux/education point of contact.
On 10/19/07, Matthew L. Avizinis <mla at gleim.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
> New subscriber here.
> I am trying to convince a small elementary school to construt/install an
> edubuntu thin client network.  One they want to know is who's using it.
> That is, they want a not necessarily exhaustive list of some schools
> that are already using Edubuntu so they can get some first hand account
> of their experiences.  I haven't been able to locate such a list yet
> anywhere on the edubuntu.org website.  Perhaps I've missed it or it's
> located elsewhere?  Can anyone here provide locations or even contact
> info please?
> Thanks much,
> Matthew
>
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