I am helping a group of educators in southern New Mexico to start a new
elementary charter school. I plan on set them up with edubuntu and LTSP. Each
classroom would have 5 thin clients and the teacher's laptop/thin client.
At this time it appears the building we will be using, a former elementary
school, has only 10 classrooms. Because of the small size we will not have a
classroom for a coumputer lab. What I wanted to do was setup a portable
computer lab using netbooks. This would allow each student to grab a netbook
and return to their own desk to work, without worrying about power or network
cables. And keyboard size is not an issue since they have small hands.
I was hoping to use the netbooks as thin clients so we could boot them off the
network and everyone logged into their own home directory and all files would
be stored on the server. This would allow the teacher to use iTalc. In doing a
little reading I see that is not going to be possible, you cannot pxe boot over
a wireless connection.
My follow up idea is each student has a USB drive and stores any files on this
instead of the netbook. I would then create a script that would make it 'easy'
to backup your USB drive to the server when connected to a thin client. I do
wonder if kinder students will be able to work in this manner. Or I could nfs
mount their home directory to the netbook over the network? This means the
student would need to login on the netbook in order for the system to know
which directory to nfs mount. Would that even work?
Does anyone have a better idea of how to setup a portable computer lab for an
elementary school? We will be serving Kinder through 5th grade to begin with.
By the time we add 6th through 8th grades we hope to have our own school built,
which will include a classroom for a computer lab.
While we do not open until next year, I need to come up with a technology
budget now (within the next 2 weeks) so I have to decide if netbooks can be
used or if I should just scrap the idea and stay with thin clients in the
classrooms.
Thanks for any ideas!
--
Lynne from NM
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