[K12OSN] My vision needs feedback.

[David Trask]

Steve...first....your idea has  merit...I like it.  I have a similar idea
for Maine schools that involves a "poor mans" install of Knoppix or some
other full featured OS on a read-only partition with a read-write
partition for /home (user files and other data).  This would lessen the
chance of people frigging up the OS.  Now...I must say that Terrell...I
can see your experience is negative, but here in Maine we are in our 5th
year of a statewide laptop deployment that is going great!  All 7th and
8th graders (and their teachers) in Maine have Apple iBooks....they do the
job nicely.  I think my Knoppix idea might work better, but hey....the
laptop program in Maine has been a resounding success to the point that
it's being expanded into grades 9-12 as well.  Many folks like Henrico
County, VA screwed up royally....Maine on the other hand....did their
homework and got it right.  The image deployed on the laptops was
carefully crafted....etc.  A laptop program can work well if you plan well
and work together as a team.....IT, administrators, teachers, and end
users.  Feel free to contact me for pointers as you move forward...I've
got 5 years of this under my belt.

On the flip side....K12LTSP with Samba/LDAP....dhcp failover/load
balancing is the way to go in a terminal server set up....my system is
kicking ass this year!  All that's left is to try and duplicate Brian
Chiver's smbldap replication stuff.  :-)

David Trask

"Support list for opensource software in schools." <k12osn at redhat.com> on
Thursday, September 22, 2005 at 11:26 PM +0000 wrote:
>Hi Steve,
>
>It's good that you've become a proponent of Free/Open Source Software.  I
>think we all wish more would.  However, as a former high school student
>not so long ago, I must ask why kids need laptops to learn readin',
>ritin', and 'rithmetic.  Since you bring up precalculus, I learned all of
>my mathematics, up to and including that needed for undergraduate quantum
>mechanics, with pencil and paper.  I took precalc and the calculus in
>high school, and I can attest that the only time that you need a computer
>for math teaching is when you're taking logarithms, and that computer can
>be a $10 solar-powered scientific calculator.  To this day, I still know
>how to take derivatives and integrals because I had to actually write it
>down back then, so I learned it really well (thank you, Mr. Madden!). 
>All the function graphing can be done either in class or in the computer
>lab.
>
>If you're just set on having laptops for all incoming freshmen (a mistake
>that we made with our faculty, BTW), then while you certainly *can* use
>K12LTSP as a thick client, and folks--including myself--certainly do, you
>don't *have* to.  You could just as easily use Ubuntu, CentOS, straight
>FC4, or any other distro that supports PAM.  But I wouldn't recommend it;
>today, I have to support teachers with wireless laptops.  It is *not*
>fun, and they don't need them.  It's yet another expensive thing to break
>or get ripped off, and I can assure you that both will happen.
>
>Now, on to your computer labs.  I would definitely go with K12LTSP
>there.  Heck, I'd go with LTSP *everywhere* in a school; very, very few
>people in a school actually *need* a fat client at work.  If you set up a
>LDAP infrastructure, then everyone running GNU/Linux or any other
>LDAP-supporting platform can authenticate at any terminal in the school
>with single-sign-on.  What's more, you can gradually migrate the users
>over from Windows to GNU/Linux gradually if you use David Trask's
>Samba-LDAP document.  You can essentially replace any NT domain
>controller infrastructure with a Samba-based one, and with Samba 3.x, you
>now get both PDC and BDC functionality if you have a LDAP back-end.
>
>Hope this helps some.
>
>--TP


David N. Trask
Technology Teacher/Coordinator
Vassalboro Community School
dtrask at vcsvikings.org
(207)923-3100