Re: [school-discuss] Request for New Intro-Duct-Shuns.

[Daniel Howard <dhhoward@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

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