At 03:10 PM 9/19/2005, you wrote:
(Let's not quibble over spelling and/or typos, OK?... (grin))
Les
Agreed, I'm a trilingual bad speller (especially in French).
My name is Daniel Howard, I am an entrepreneur and former associate
director of the Georgia Tech Broadband Telecommunications Center in
Atlanta, Ga. I sold my first startup in 2000, worked for the
broadband communications chip manufacturer that acquired it, and now
am working on my second startup, focusing on development of software
that can convert any children's TV program into an educational
interactive experience using web-powered personal video recorder
technology and wikipedia type web content.
But the real reason I'm on the list is that I had been a parent
volunteer at my daughter's elementary school for the last two years
and just go so fed up with beating Win95 and Win98 machines in
classrooms into some form of functionality that I started looking for
alternatives. Along with my partner in crime in this endeavor,
William Fragakis (also on this list) we converted the computer lab to
K12LTSP thin clients over the summer using diskless workstations built
from scratch, and have deployed K12LTSP servers to about a fourth of
the classrooms, starting with the higher grades and moving down
hallways. Classrooms that previously had 0-3 working computers (but
slow!) now have one teacher's PC (WinXP, maintained by the school
system), one zippy K12LTSP server and 4-5 zippy clients using both
older school PCs and those donated to the school by local businesses
and families. You should hear how the teachers rave about the change
and the seachange in their attitude about technology in the classroom!
I also started a volunteer program called the eParents made up of
computer savvy parents who can help demonstrate the new K12LTSP
software to their assigned classroom teachers and students and also
frequently check on the status of the PCs in their assigned
classroom. As you can imagine, typically parents are assigned to
rooms with their kids in them, so they're highly motivated to keep the
rooms up and running. Not that the server/thin clients need support,
it's typically the Windows PCs that get issues. We're also training
them on the overall software and hardware setups, so that when someday
William and I move on, there will be parents left at the school who
can keep the system up and running. Our long term model is for the
PTA to buy new servers for classrooms every 3-5 years, and use donated
computers from local businesses and homes to replace clients, until at
some point clients get small and cheap enough (a la NIVO) that we can
consider shifting away from donated computers and put small form
factor clients and LCD screens in the classrooms. But this system
works great with older school and donated computers; the problem for
the teachers has gone from "how can I get the computers in my
classroom to work" to "where do I put all these working computers in
my classroom."
Kudos to the K12LTSP team for a great distro!
Daniel