[ubuntu-florida] who's using Edubuntu?

[Andrew Watts]

You need to sell it to them that this is the future for their students,
including the parents.  Honestly though i would talk to the school and the
parents about the XO laptop.  If they can afford to send there kid to a
private school they should be able to cope with the XO laptop.  It's $180.
the kids will be able to bring the system home with them and be able to
everything that they can do otherwise.  It may not be Ubuntu but remember,
the system was designed for kids, what ever is best for the kids is the most
important part.  They will have the ability to communicate and if you were
to have a server in every class all the lessons could be put on the XO.  I
bet if the school were to work with One Laptop Per Child that they would be
all for working out something where each child spent 200 per laptop and the
extra $20 went to OLPC.  Again, this IS a private school, don't let those
parents tell you they cant afford it.  Those kids wont be able to break
anything and will have a laptop that they can take home and work on.  If you
are planning to buy new hardware anyway this would be the best solution.
Thin clients cost money and the last time i checked the XO OLPC was alot
better than a thin client PC, its small, portable, about the same price as a
thin client and best of all the student can OWN it and use it at home too.
The biggest bonus is that if the kid breaks the OS he/she or a parent can
easily fix it at home without any CD or other extraneous software,
everything that is needed is already there.  its an all in one solution to
the problem and costs the school nothing, everyone wins.  The kids won't
care what it's doing nor will the school.  The beautiful thing is that these
laptops are self networking, you won't need to add any major network
infrastructure it should just work out of box, so easy a child in the 3rd
world can do it.  this is a lot cheaper than any PC on the market and its
virtually zero configuration, with thin clients and the like it there is a
problem it can take days or weeks to fix, money always needs to be spent
setting things up.  Thin clients are difficult to setup (for the average
user, try telling a teacher to set one up, HA) and if you leave the program
goes belly up.  With the XO all you need to have is a few wireless access
points and the mesh network in the XO does the rest.  if one child in the
room has internet/network access, all of them do.  The teacher can also run
all the notebooks at the same time, say during a lecture the teacher takes
control and provides an up close and personal interactive lesson right
there.  The perfect solution to a very difficult problem.  Not only is it
cost efficient, its also time efficient for both the school and the
students.  The only problem with it is, how ever, getting OLPC to sell the
laptops to the school.  Personally i think that every child in the world
should have this laptop issued to them every year in school, there just
isn't much you can do to break them. and as they progress through grade
school give them more advanced laptops.  The XO is water resistant, drop
resistant and most importantly kid tested to work every time with a great
battery life (8+ hours) so it will last most, if not all of the day.  Any
open source software you want to use should work on it too.  Let me know
what you think.

Andrew

On 10/22/07, Matthew L. Avizinis <mla at gleim.com> wrote:
>
>  I am working with a private school.  The cost of replacing their quite
> old mac is quite expensive.  However, they have the money.  I am a parent of
> one the students and they tell me the proposal I've made is at least being
> considered at strongly as the Mac or PC options.  One of the biggest
> advantages of the thin client network is the *large* cost savings over
> Apple laptops they want to get (they don't currently have a network).
> Fortunately I don't have to deal with a public school board.  I have already
> demonstrated a live cd version of the OS to them and they like the licensing
> scheme -- free.  I will be providing software assistance and I have a
> network admin person to volunteer some time.  One of the main things they're
> looking for is to find some other folks experiences.
> Based on the amount of work that's apparently gone into it, I would've
> thought more schools would be using it.  Oh well, I guess if they go with it
> *they* will be the cutting edge.
>
> ElementC wrote:
>
> 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> <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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