Our school district is piloting Google Apps in Education. It's a natural fit to use Google with the Netbooks. "Working in the cloud" is a term that I am hearing everywhere- TV commercials, educational journals, blogs and so on. The Netbooks are the perfect machine for cloud computing. Jolicloud makes it easier. There are numerous apps offered through Jolicloud that may be added to the Netbooks. Management could be an issue, but with Ubuntu you are able to sync an App change. Make that change on one machine and when the others log in the next time, they just need to run their sync for the App to show. The icons make locating items an easy task.
With any pilot program, your main job is to find out what works and what doesn't. Often times human error can ruin an otherwise great idea. I created a Google document to share with the class with a list of instructions. By following the directions, students would review the basics of word processing. Thing is, I forgot to share the document properly. Now that I have, I will be eager to read student responses.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Monday, December 6, 2010
Getting Acquainted with Netbooks
We are an Apple School. There have only been about 6 PC's in the school in my 11 year experience as Tech Specialist here. BUT...an opportunity presented itself and we now have 26 Dell Inspiron mini Netbooks. They are assigned to AW's class and offer a one to one computer initiative. They were introduced last week and the excitement was contagious!
Preliminary set up and organization are key. Our district subscribes to Atomic Learning and I used the tutorials in the Netbook workshop to help me out. It can be difficult helping others with a technology that you've never 'touched'. Atomic Learning had nice pdf handouts available and they were used to send home information to the students and parents.
My first decision to make: keep the machine with Windows or try a Linux OS.
After 4 days using Windows, I knew we needed to look seriously at an alternative. The Netbook took about 3 minutes to boot up, numerous updates would run and seemed to be needed daily. We had the concern for viruses, which had never been an issue for us before. Also, this class is participating in a Google Apps for Education pilot program in the district. Since we'd be "working in the cloud", I felt Linux would be the way to go. My friend and colleague AD helped me out. He chose Ubuntu with Jolicloud. The system was loaded on several SD cards and installation on 26 machines took a little over 2 hours.
We used a Bretford laptop cart and used additional power strips to accommodate the power plugs. The odd shaped Netbook plugs prevent the use of a traditional power strip.
I gave the classroom teacher address labels and had the kids create a name tag. I thought perhaps their own name tag would create a sense of pride and encourage care of the machines. After tagging, the Netbooks were ready to roll out.
Preliminary set up and organization are key. Our district subscribes to Atomic Learning and I used the tutorials in the Netbook workshop to help me out. It can be difficult helping others with a technology that you've never 'touched'. Atomic Learning had nice pdf handouts available and they were used to send home information to the students and parents.
My first decision to make: keep the machine with Windows or try a Linux OS.
After 4 days using Windows, I knew we needed to look seriously at an alternative. The Netbook took about 3 minutes to boot up, numerous updates would run and seemed to be needed daily. We had the concern for viruses, which had never been an issue for us before. Also, this class is participating in a Google Apps for Education pilot program in the district. Since we'd be "working in the cloud", I felt Linux would be the way to go. My friend and colleague AD helped me out. He chose Ubuntu with Jolicloud. The system was loaded on several SD cards and installation on 26 machines took a little over 2 hours.
We used a Bretford laptop cart and used additional power strips to accommodate the power plugs. The odd shaped Netbook plugs prevent the use of a traditional power strip.
I gave the classroom teacher address labels and had the kids create a name tag. I thought perhaps their own name tag would create a sense of pride and encourage care of the machines. After tagging, the Netbooks were ready to roll out.
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