[K12OSN] Teacher Computer

[jconlon1 at elp.rr.com]

Having been part of creating such a lab in Richardson Middle School.
1. Thin Client is good enough for most teachers in an open lab situation.
2. A dual boot machine might be an option for a teacher station as this would allow the teacher to use either by choosing the operating system at boot up.  It is possible to set things up so that at boot time the computer first seeks to PXE boot and requires the escape key to by pass to the OS chooser screen.  If you are going to install a Linux in it use the same one that is in the server but in the standalone version.
3. Dual monitors is both a hardware and a software issue, the video card needs two monitor outputs or the computer needs a second video card. I'm not sure what the software settings in Linux are, I'm guessing that you are using K12LTSP V6 at least or Ubuntu with the educational server package added.
4. What ever you do make sure that the teacher machine has a minimum of two or better GIG of RAM and that the video has a high value of RAM on board.
5. I actually built my own ten station Linux thin client network for the classroom I had and did run fl_teacher_tool all of the time.  It is needed to keep the kids from abusing things like semi-porn sites and such.  The ability to see what the students are doing and provide assistance from my machine was too helpful not to use.  I actually used my server to do everything.

I hope this helps
John P. Conlon

---- John Montoya <jomontoya at kern.org> wrote: 
> Hello everyone,
> 
> New Lab Install - II
> 
> Yesterday I went out to the school site and installed k12 / 5-EL. Went relatively well. Removed OpenOffice 2.4 and installed OpenOffice 3.0, working now on 
> updating fl TeacherTool to 0.60  - THEN.... going to take my shot at getting the students to authenticate through the schools Active Directory servers !!!!!! joy - <smile>
> 
> The next couple of days should be interesting - I'll keep everyone posted with authentication part of this.
> 
> Now to my question....
> What is the best solution for a teacher's computer ?
> 
> Here is the thought process.... I was going to take a decent business level desktop machine and setup a dual boot (Win XP and [another ?] Fedora 9 or CentOs 5).
> But now I'm thinking.... well - why not just a regular XP machine - then she can choose at boot-up to run XP or run PXE to become a thin client machine too.
> ... but  <smile>.... she also wants two monitors are her desk - she would like one screen to run the snap-shots / fl_TeacherTool all the time - then have the second display to run the rest of 
> her linux desktop.
> 
> So the more I think about this....
> 
> 
> How would you arrange this environment? 
> 30 lab machines.... obvious thin clients... but what about the teachers machine? - another thin client or a stand alone linux machine that logs into the network... ?????
> 
> 
> 
> thanks,
> 
> 
> john-
> 
> 
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> 
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