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.
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