Linux in Indiana Schools Support

From BLUG

In August of 2005, the State of Indiana Board of Education announced that they were going to be purchasing 300,000 Linux based computers for secondary school in Indiana. This makes Indiana the first U.S. state to try such a large project for Linux in an educational setting. They originally choose to go with a Linspire based solution but now it is evident that they have expanded into either using a mix of Linspire and Novell Linux Desktop (based on SuSE Linux) or just Novell Linux Desktop. According to Steven Cole at Bloomington North High School, they are using Novell Linux Desktop, which is good because probably more people are familiar with SuSE than they are with the Linspire distribution, even though Linspire is supposed to be based on Debian.

Several people on and off of the BLUG mailing list have expressed an interest in getting involved in this project. Two people at Bloomington High School North, Steven Cole and Linda Reeves, have asked for our advice and help with supporting their project. According to Steven, the goals for the Linux In Indiana schools pilot project are not necessarily to use Linux and Open Source Software, but to bring pervasive, one-to-one computing to educational settings and to understand that impact on instruction and learning. Some research tends to suggest that students write better when computers are readily available. Its more of an experiment than a permenent move. That's fine. If a Linux distribution can do that for them then that's great. What matters is that their computers work for them. If we can show them that there is indeed support from the community and that this change can be easy for them, they are more likely to consider expanding the pilot and possibly making this a more permanent thing.

Current team for this project

Put your name here if you want to join this team. Also give a short description of what you would like to do on the team. We'll definitely need a leader to help schedule meetings and give the team some direction.

• Joe Auty (Linda Reeves is my mother-in-law, so perhaps I would be best suited to help work and communicate with her with specific classroom/educational issues. My Linux experience is limited to servers and individual desktops.)
• Jeff Welty - I would like to get some of this in our documentary as it happens in the Bloomington schools. As far as my Linux experience, I'm not so good at Audio/Video stuff, drivers, wireless or getting wonky hardware to work.
• Kirk Gleason - I just want to help with the project. My skills are probably stronger regarding backend functionality, but I do use Linux as my desktop, so I do have some skill in configuring KDE (no Gnome skills at all) and using the basic functionality of OO.org. I also used to be a teacher, so I could help out in that arena. Basically, given a challenge I will find the solution.
• Bob Piercy - I would like to help anyway I can. My experience is mainly as a software developer, but I have had to administer small linux networks before, and I have tinkered around with lots of different Open Source software.
• Sim♀n A. Ruiz - I am the Technology Assistant at Bloomington High School North. I'll be the one sucking technical support out of this community to apply to the project as an insider.
• etc...

Schedule

Ideas for Support and Presentations

• I think that any presentation we put on should not be "rah rah, isn't Linux great" designed for other Linux users, but should be an accounting of usability issues that surfaced during the duration of this pilot. I believe that the students and teachers there would be excellent usability testers, and that we should put on our HCI (human computer interaction) hats in studying this interaction. Our goal should not be to overwhelm people with cool server/Desktop tricks and geeky security stuff, but to provide highly practical and pragmatic knowledge that will help create as much usability and simplicity as possible with these machines. The more transparent their machines are, the better. Joe 19:28, 26 Jan 2006 (GMT)
• Software for instructor classroom control of workstations (e.g. observe, control, share screen, lock screens) Joe 19:28, 26 Jan 2006 (GMT)
• Based on the above, help Cole refine the build where assistance is welcomed. It would be neat if we could work with other Indiana schools using this pilot, and share resources/build materials Joe 19:28, 26 Jan 2006 (GMT)
• Setting up a wiki/knowledge base that could be accessible across the state could be helpful. We could use this to document our experiences, as well as solutions to problems that have been solved. It could also be used to post training material / techniques that have proven particularly useful (or not useful). (KG)
• about setting up the wiki/knowledge base - real good idea, especially since I work in Terre Haute - can we use this wiki? I think that mediawiki has some other plugins for asynchronous communication, like blogs. I will check it out and post again. Then we could do most of the stuff here and the blug listserve. (RJP)