NB: Subject changed to differentiate from the other topic, although it
might have been better had the other thread been renamed instead (I'll
say no more on that subject...)
andy hudson wrote:
1) Internet access and an office suite (many educational resources and
our learning platform are online) from all machines.
2) 'Limited maintenance' - as a full time teacher the ideal would be
to maintain one machine per classroom and for this to act as a server
to the thin clients within the room. My thinking behind this being if
one server fails the other classrooms are still operational.
3) A master server to provide home directories that can be propagated
to the classroom slave servers.
4) Web caching on the masters and slaves..
All of those sound pretty reasonable and deliverable.
The timescale would be setup a pilot classroom in the next month. This
solution is not common in primary schools in Peterborough so I'm
sticking my neck out a bit with this proposal.
I'm sure we'll all stick our necks out to help you with this. What
hardware do you have for experimentation?
We ought to be able to set up a small test network using a handful of
PCs and use that as a topic for a PLUG meeting. I'm slightly nervous
about suggesting it as it may turn into a "too many cooks" project with
the obvious consequences but as long as you expect that rather than a
coherent training session it should be useful. It would also give the
various experts in this thread a chance to showcase their skills :-)
I should be able to find a few spare PCs to set up the test network here
(although a lot of the second hand kit we have is somewhat surprisingly
flying off shelves at the moment, but worst case a few virtual machines
will suffice for this I think).
NB: I'm offering a venue and probably hardware, not expertise in this
area (I'll be very interested in the project and hopefully have
something helpful to offer at some point).
We could also doubtless do this on-site if necessary.
I need to see if it is practical and manageable in a classroom
environment. I don't think the children will have any problems but
convincing staff may be another matter!
You may wish to seek commercial support, whether with people here or
(and?) with (for example) a company like Canonical if you pick an
Ubuntu-based distro (you mentioned Edubuntu). But also note that you'll
probably get better unpaid help here on this list and at PLUG meetings
than you'd get with a Windows solution, and if it helps I'm sure we can
offer lots of free software to staff (look, shiny CDs!) to assist buy-in.
There's also nothing to stop you putting together a CD of free software
(eg OpenOffice.org, etc, for Windows) and selling it to raise money for
school funds - try that with MS!
The thought of getting schools to at least give free software a fair
look in is something that's a motivation for a lot of us. We do however
need to be careful not to scare you off by "playing" with things and
breaking things. In particular, make sure Stuart L doesn't know where
you're setting this up...
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Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG
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