[school-discuss] bootable CDs?

["" <marilyn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Does anyone else see the potential in bootable CDs?  

I used them the moment I discovered them back in 2003.  I was teaching
keyboarding and Knoppix 3.2 had a copy of LyX on it.  The students used LyX to
write reports for their other classes.  I sent a Knoppix CD home with every kid
at the end of the term.

Since then I've kept up with Knoppix and frequently have used it as my primary
OS, using my hard disk just for storage.  Since my technical expertise is not
at the level of most of you on this list (music teacher . . . yesterday I spent
the day playing "Hot Cross Buns" on recorders all day), I appreciate that
Knoppix usually sees my hardware and networks easily.  It's much less
complicated then messing with an installation.

Last Spring someone from the schoolforge list sent out a link to Frozen Tech's
Live CD List.  http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php

Wow!  That was like Christmas!  I had no idea there were so many flavors!

I found two I liked for school use right away.  I use Kanotix to print out
posters, but the most important for me is Musix.

For the past two years I have been teaching music at an intermediate school. 
Musix is a bootable music studio.  I boot from the Musix CD, it sees the sound
card and presto - I've got sequencers, synthesizers, music notation editors,
drum machines, a music theory game and even a guitar tuner.  I have permission
from my system administrator to use bootables so next week I am taking all of
my music classes to the lab to run Musix.  We will play the music game, play
with the drum machine, and write a recorder song using only five notes.

Couldn't we have a bootable CD for each subject area - math, science, writing,
art?  A teacher can use bootables without the district adopting a new OS.  

We will be using Samba Network Neighborhood to save our work on district
servers.  

Of course you all know about Freeduc.  I use that with my little kids at home.

I am giving a presentation on bootable CDs at our local TCEA conference on
10/28.  It will be interesting to see if anyone attends!

Later,
Marilyn