[school-discuss] Academic performance goes up with OSS and more working PCs

[Daniel Howard <dhhoward@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Schoolforge folk,

William and I recently got this email from a teacher at Brandon 
Elementary, where William and I converted all of the aging classroom 
computers to thin clients and went from 1-2 working PCs per class to now 
5-6, with some rooms having 8-9 working PCs.  This 1st grade teacher was 
teacher of the year recently, is an early-adopter/willing experimentee 
of new technology, and so William and I set her up with K12LTSP last 
September.  Thus, she is one of the few teachers who have had the Linux 
OSS all year long.  She strongly feels that having functional and more 
PCs has had a direct impact on student performance, see below.

If anyone has thoughts on how we could accurately measure/characterize 
this effect for other teachers who have just recently been set up, let 
me know, I think we're on to something here.  I'm thinking there is a 
huge difference between having 1-2 working PCs (where a class of 20 
would only get an hour or more individual access to the PC a few times a 
week) vs. having 7-8 PCs where students can have individual access for 
over an hour every day.  The fact that students can take an online test 
immediately after learning material is probably relevant as well.  We 
could never have afforded to buy so many new PCs with Win XP, Office XP 
and antivirus software; instead we received over 100 donated PCs from 
businesses and converted them into thin clients.   What do you folks 
think?  Daniel

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Dear William and Daniel,

Thank you so much for all of the time and energy you have put into the 
technology needs of Morris Brandon this year.  I love the Linux 
software. My students are discovering fun, educational games to play 
every day.

Having 7 working computers in my classroom has helped increase student 
performance in both reading and math.  My students are able to access 
Accelerated Reader whenever they are finished reading a book.  The 
average grade equivalent score of the students in my classroom on the 
Star Reading Test has jumped from 2.0 at the beginning of the year to 
2.7 at the beginning of third quarter.

I have seen an even larger jump in the mathematics computation scores of 
the students in my classroom.  At the beginning of the year my students 
scored an average of 40.31% on a first grade computation test.  At 
mid-year the average score of the students in my classroom had increased 
48.44 points for a class average of 88.75%.  Because of the number of 
working computers in my classroom, my students are able to access and 
play the First in Math Website more often than the students were able in 
years past.  My class is now first in the nation for first grade students.

I believe the academic success of my students is directly linked to the 
wonderful technology solutions that you have implemented at Morris 
Brandon.  Thank you so much!