[ubuntu-florida] who's using Edubuntu?

Martin Wilson martinmwilson at gmail.com
Mon Oct 22 20:52:29 BST 2007


I hate to chime in mid discussion here, but aren't the XO laptops not
available for sale in North America?  I don't mean to take down such a good
argument, and trust me I think XO laptops would rock for this school, but I
believe OLPC has announced they will only be selling their laptops to
governments.  The only way to obtain an XO at the moment is to participate
in the "Give 1, get 1" program, in which you donate $399, and one child in a
developing world obtains a laptop and you also get one for personal use.
And this program only runs from November 12th for a short period of time.

On 10/22/07, Andrew Watts <systemstalker at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
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