On 23/11/2019 15:49, Christopher Hunter via GLLUG wrote:
On 22/11/2019 20:16, Chris Bell via GLLUG wrote:
On Friday, 22 November 2019 19:51:16 GMT John Winters via GLLUG wrote:
That rings a few bells. I've written some FOSS software for schools,
but in my experience of dealing with school IT people their
knowledge of
IT is generally slight to non-existent. To make matters worse, there
are some big suppliers to schools who really prey on this deficiency.
They very much rely on schools having no-one capable of calling out
their bullshit.
A friend was asked to set up a server and some desktop computers in a
local
junior school. The school had a contract with a major education
"provider"
which required their IT system to be provided and maintained only by
that
company, and the school was not allowed to access the system, so the new
computers were to be a totally separate independent system and hidden
from
the contractor.
I've recently been in exactly that situation! The school want to
teach the basics of computing to 8 - 11 year-old children and
purchased a boxful of Raspberry Pi 3B boards and cases for them. They
also bought a boxful of power adaptors, and initially used their
existing USB-connected keyboards and mice from their
contractor-provided PCs.
That shows the success of the Computing At School project. I had a small
part in kicking that off. We got a lot of pushback from sysadmins.
That's understandable because they were often teachers Shanghaied into
taking on the extra work to save money and given no training. The FOSS
community gave us a lot of their time reassuring harassed teachers that
installing Python wouldn't bring the world crashing down around their
ears. The project has been a runaway success and now it's quite common
for six year-olds to be programming simple games using Scratch.
I've seen it from the other side too. I managed a team of engineers
supporting a secondary school. It was one of the first to provide
laptops to all of the students. We had a particularly enlightened Head
who knew his own limits and didn't ask for miracles. In other schools
the first time a student downloaded some smutty pictures there would be
an inquisition. He appreciated that we were in an arms race against the
little darlings and saw it as a part of their education.
I constructed a Raspbian image with a few educational extras for them,
and taught the three teachers and the teaching assistants how to use
"Etcher" to write the cards. I also gave them a brief tutorial on
getting the SBCs connected to the wi-fi network. All of them have
joined their local LUG and this has given them more knowledge and
abilities that they can pass on to their pupils.
I had to open up the school wi-fi network since the contractor had
locked it down to only allow connection of "approved" machines (ie:
the ones they'd supplied) and they charged £120 per machine (plus
call-out charge) just to simply add an over-priced computer to the
network!
There was one particular specialist in the education sector that was
full of tricks like that. "Reassuringly expensive" is the phrase. I got
my own back a while later when they dropped the ball and I ran an audit
and pen-test on their head office systems. Very satisfying.
Shortly after my changes, the contractor visited the school and
fortunately didn't notice the changes to "their" routers (their
"engineers" are of the "monkey see, monkey do" variety), but we
decided that discretion was a good idea, and now the school has a
second "pupils" wi-fi network!
It's quite possible they looked the other way. Some of those engineers
are very nearly human.
The contractor-provided PCs are mostly gathering dust now. The
children really like having their "own" little computers and have
taken to proper programming very quickly. The original PC-based
computer "education" was to have consisted fo lessons on using various
MS "Office" packages - hardly a proper computer education!
Yes. That's why the CAS project was started. This week I was at a
meeting to kick off a new project.being funded by the Royal Academy of
Engineering. We need more engineers in the UK and just as importantly we
need teachers to understand what engineers do. The Academy is looking
for successful engineers (they mean you chaps.) to volunteer some time
to go into schools and tell the inmates what a spiffy time we engineers
have in our work. How else are we going to train the next generation of
BOFHs.
--
Bernard Peek
[email protected]
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