[school-discuss] First the city of Atlanta, next a country!

[Daniel Howard <dhhoward@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Fellow Schoolforgers,

A quick update on Atlanta public schools and a new project I'm starting.

First, Atlanta schools had a pilot of K12LTSP in 7 schools this past 
year.  With the exception of one school (where the principal wasn't 
enthusiastic about the pilot and didn't really motivate the teachers to 
use the new system) every other school saw significant academic 
performance improvement on a statewide test relative to their peer 
schools.  I now hear that APS is planning to roll the system out 
district-wide, and many other US schools are contacting them to find out 
how they did it and what they need to have to do likewise.  A few people 
can make a difference.
Second, one of my teachers did some missionary work in Malawi (southern 
Africa) a while back, and just got back from revisiting there, and was 
lamenting to me about how villages in this very poor country had no idea 
about the outside world.  For more detail, check out her classroom blog 
page at http://hultquistthirdgrade.blogspot.com/   Many of these 
villages have no electricity.
I did some googling, and found schools in India that used solar arrays 
to power a handful of PCs and I started thinking: why not use a solar 
array to power a satellite Internet receiver, a K12LTSP or Edubuntu LTSP 
server, and a handful of thin clients and LCD monitors (to keep 
electricity requirements low).  Such satellite Internet service is 
available here in US, Europe, South Africa, Northern Africa, and heck, 
maybe even a spot beam that covers Malawi.  Jim Kinney, the Linux 
architect that did the APS enterprise K12LTSP version for APS, suggested 
a server that boots and runs off of Flash memory to eliminate the hard 
disk electricity consumption, and the kids could do all file storage on 
the web (word processing, spreadsheet, etc.)
What do you guys think of this idea?  Has it been done anywhere else 
with lessons learned?  My teacher says the biggest thing these kids in 
these villages could have is to see and interact with the rest of the 
world.  I can't help but think this is technically feasible and for a 
fairly modest amount, could invoke a seachange in how these villages 
educate their kids.
Comments, criticisms, even cheap shots, welcome.

Best regards,
Daniel
--
Daniel Howard
President and CEO
Georgia Open Source Education Foundation