Teach42

Steve,

Thanks so much for getting this conversation going. Hope to get some great feedback. Another option that I hadn’t even thought about came to me as I was talking to Seth Bowers in Deerfield, IL last night. He suggested Edubuntu.

I’ve heard of this and have looked at it before, but I’ve never installed or used it. If anyone has experience with this platform. I would like to hear about that as well.

Steve,
Great thoughts here. I just ressurected to iMacs (red ones, I know nothing else about them) that were supposed to be sent to “the graveyard”. Students are beginning use Google Docs and WikiSpaces to keep track of lesson schedules, and a great site called musictheory.net for ear-training. The computers were not worth saving for their harddrive and ram specs alone, but by “hooking ‘em up to the net”, we’ve discovered that they’re not quite dead yet.
Personally, I have used Edubuntu (as an experiment) and really like it. It would help if I was more linux savvy, but I’m sure if I wanted to use it more seriously, it wouldn’t take long to learn.

What timing! Just last hour I heard this comment from a student as we were frustrated in getting a TeacherTube video to load from our wiki…”Why don’t we just get a regular computer with Internet Explorer!” We have one lab with 15 eight year old blue iMacs. They are unbearably slow,but we muddle along using classblogmeister and as much interactive collaborative stuff as possible. We have used GoogleDocs and wikispaces, Buzzword and but the enthusiasm that should be there is a bit quenched by the sssslllooowww operation of the machines. But…we carry on! Many of the kids think it is Macs in general because their home computers run so much smoother…thought of using that one in a letter to Steve Jobs… Maybe some day!

So Sara, in comparison to newer computers, when you go into something like Google Docs or classblogmeister, how do the older ones perform?

So we’re a Windows-based school. About a year and a half ago I had a classroom full of Windows 98 machines. I loaded them up with Firefox and was happy to access our Moodle installation, record audio with Audacity, and various other Internet based tools.

I don’t have them anymore.

So about two months ago I got an email from the local high school’s broadcast journalism class who had two older Macs they didn’t need. One is a 12″ iBook running Panther and the other runs Tiger and is only slightly newer. The iBook has no CD drive and the software badly needed updating.

Today, my kids used the newer one to work on a movie in iMovie (iMovie 3, thank you) and another kid is using the iBook to take a test in our Moodle. Earlier, kids were recording audio with Audacity on the little iBook.

With Internet and open source software, anything is possible.

I’ve run Ubuntu, Edubuntu, I’ve even put Xubuntu on a few old machines. It doesn’t matter what operating system you run as long as you can access the basics of cross-platform software (i.e. Audacity) and the Internets using a cross-platform browser (Firefox).

Sure the older ones perform slower but who cares? Slow access beats no access.

If I could use Linux and not get fired, I would, but I’m doing good to convice them to let me put those two macs on the network.

Chris

We have a Spanish classroom outfitted with 30 “old” macs. All others in the school were auctioned. But, in that room, we Moodle, VoiceThread (text only comments to teacher-uploaded images) word-process, listen to audio. It works great. When necessary, we bring in the iPods. There are two sets of 15 iPods available for check-out in the Media Center.

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Steve, what a great thread going here. We have approximately 250 computers at our school. They are all Dell PCs. Roughly half of them are GX150s running Windows 98 with 128MB of RAM. A few run Windows 2000. The rest are XPs. No Vistas yet. We just refurbished 26 of the GX150s by adding memory and upgrading to XP through the money provided through a Microsoft settlement for TN. We can’t afford to upgrade memory on all of them, so we are going to move 25 to 30 of them to form a new lab for teaching keyboarding. You don’t need a lot of bells and whistles for that!

Tim,

Have you worked in Google Docs or a blog, or Flickr, or Picnik, or Audacity using your Win 98 computers? What I want to see is if these older computers would work well enough with these types of online apps without frustrating the end user. If you haven’t tried and would be willing to spend a bit of time hacking at it a bit, I would love to hear your results.

I’ve got to get my hands on an old computer!!!

Our district is dual-platform with Macs in the elementary grades and PC’s in secondary classrooms. I am a Special Education teacher working with 4th and 5th grade emotionally disturbed students. I look for any type of technology to engage my kids. A few years ago, the district had an auction, but prior to it they offer teachers first shot. I grabbed several Apple 1400C laptops and even some Apple 145 laptops even some Apple Classics (mostly for bookends or make an aquarium out of). I’m not an Apple fan, although I like them for their oddness. I even scooped up an iMac teardrop (lime green) and a Apple Clamshell laptop. Our Mac technician ramped up the 1400′s and the clamshell is running OSX. This gives me a laptop for each student, which they think is cool, which motivates them. The 1400 aren’t on the Internet, but there are lots of other things they will do. I got a CD drive off of eBay to be able to load software of them as they only had floppy’s. I even have educational software that will run on the old 145′s which have a trackball mouse. Kids think that’s cool, too! We also have a dozen or so older Palm IIIC’s that we have software for.
In my classroom, too, I have 4 desktop PC’s running XP and all on the net. I also have a new eMac and an older iLamp, as i like to call it, it the iMac with a lamp base and the swivel flat panel monitor. These are also Internet connected. I have a couple of PC laptops, too, with Vista. My PC tablet was stolen earlier in the year.
We blog, podcast, iMovie, Geocache, GarageBand, and whatever else I can get the kids into.

Using k12ltsp, we are able to put our ten year old macs (all in one g3s) online running the newest version of Firefox and Openoffice.org. Any machine older than 5 years are being converted to Linux terminals. We’re slowly moving to under 3:1 student to computer ratio.

I’ve started to convert our 5-6 year old iBook g3s over to wireless Linux terminals. Their batteries don’t hold up very long, but they are easier to find space in the room for them.

I’m at a top 5 university in Korea and we’re lucky to have chalk.

Isn’t it interesting that a majority of the comments are from people with Macs? What does that say about a Macs usable life and cost of ownership?

Ryan,

I know I had some original iMacs in the lab where I used to work – 3 labs of 25 computers.

I bought the three labs my first year there. 7 years later when i left the school. All but 2 of them remained. The only upgrade ever done was to add RAM. They have a great TCO and longevity,

My classroom has two desktops and two laptops (Dells); all of which are three years old or a lot older (1 desktop is at least 7 years old). We also have a cart of laptops that are 4 years old or more. My kids use BlackBoard for blogs and wikis, because that’s what our district allows. They use delicious regularly. They haven’t had any trouble with any of the computers.

Steve: My fifth grade class is a 1:1 laptop class. We use 8 year old keylime green Apple iBook Computers accessing the network over original Apple Airport Hubs. My students began this program last year in 4th grade – I have them again this year in 5th and will roll them to 6th grade.
We use our laptops to blog:
http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=65078
:ast year the class did a wiki page project for a local animal park. Each group of 3 to 4 students made 3 wiki pages and then used that info to design new animals to live in the Great Basin – we made a video about it too:
http://crosbyprojects.wikispaces.com/Animal+Ark
We use Flickr for numerous projects – we illustrate poetry with our own photos, make book covers and more with FD’s Flickr Tools:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/34879177@N00/
We are about to begin using Google Docs on a collaborative project:
http://classroombooktalk.wikispaces.com/Mysteries+of+Harris+Burdick
We are producing a video about blogging – what it is and why it is valuable that we hope to finish fairly soon. Each group is responsible for part of the video … we have been doing voiceovers of their parts and will soon download the parts from various of their iBooks from iMovie 2 which runs on these old guys to one computer for a final edit.
We use our class wiki page daily to access the various web sites and software we use:
http://crosbyclass.wikispaces.com/
The students don’t use their computers to Skype (because they are too old for that) but we do various Skype projects (see the class wiki page for examples) – but the students routinely blog about about these Skype projects.
And we do more.
My school district outlawed Macs 5 months after we got these and keeps hoping these will break down so they can remove them from our school (we are a HP district now) but I just had a meeting on Friday with the head of IT and they are going to take away our 8 year old Airport hubs and replace them with 4 Cisco hubs so we have a faster connection since our computers just keep going they’ve given up waiting for them to break down.
I tell about much of what my students do on my blog:
http://learningismessy.com/blog/
in case you want to keep track of us.
Thanks,
Brian

Steve – forgot to mention – their are 27 students in my class … each has a laptop and I have 2 laptops waiting in case I get new students. We “upgraded” to Panther (OS 10.3) 2 years ago year with a site lic. from Apple that cost $2,500.
Brian

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