I.T. from scratch for small primary school

smallvaluesof2

My local small rural primary school will shortly be getting its first little batch of computers. A few volunteers including myself will help plan and maintain the fledgling I.T. services and also recommend educational software and activities involving the user of computers. My background is mostly Linux software engineering with a sprinkling of Windows admin. Budget is modest and broadband will not available for the foreseeable future (coverage issues).

I'd love to hear the experiences and recommendations of folk involved in similar activities and am happy to share anything of interest I learn along the way.

mach1982

If know Linux why not install edubuntu

smallvaluesof2

Well, I did give Edubuntu a whirl a couple of months ago with my 5 year old but didn't find it terribly convincing, at least not for a child of my kid's age. Then again, I wasn't using it in a structured way. If some teachers / parents / etc have experience of using it in a primary school-like setting, I'd be happy to re-evaluate in light of their findings.

I heard good things about the [Windows based] Reader Rabbit series of edu-games from teachers from two primary schools and found a couple of titles in the bargain bucket of a local computer shop for around 8 euro each.
Haven't tried them yet.

By the way, not especially pro or anti Windows and expect to end up with a mixture of Windows and Linux boxes. Cost will be a factor though. (Sorry, Mac users, don't think you will get a look in).

#15

smallvaluesof2 wrote: »

. A few volunteers including myself will help plan and maintain the fledgling I.T. services and also recommend educational software and activities involving the user of computers.

Wordshark.

Starfall.com

byhookorbycrook

Numbershark is excellent too.If the school uses Jolly Phonics, there's a great cd-rom to accompany the series.
Take a look at www.anseo.net

a123

NU Baggin Dragon
Speedtables
Type to Learn 3
Numbershark

Reader Rabbit series are nice, as is Jolly phonics and wordshark

smallvaluesof2

Thanks for the recommendations. And the anseo.net looks like a great resource. I will comb through it over the weekend.

I have been looking into the licensing costs of setting up a windows 2008 server accessed via rdesktop on cheap linux clients. In theory, this would save money and make maintenance easier as the linux clients would be stateless. I also thought that if we set up Microsoft Office on the 2008 server, the number of licenses required would be the same as the number of concurrent users allowed on the 2008 server. For example, we might have 10 PCs running linux that could connect to the 2008 server but no more than 5 could be connected at any given time.

Apparently though, we would need one Microsoft Office license per device (ie 10 licenses) even though the clients are Linux and the 2008 server itself would restrict the number of concurrent sessions. [Windows server 2008 also requires a license per concurrent user but the educational pricing is quite low]. I had expected that the number of MS Office licenses required would be the same as the number of concurrent sessions permitted on the 2008 server.

If you have not heard of it, OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org) is a popular free alternative to Microsoft Office and is maintained by Sun Microsystems/Oracle. There are several comparison sites online if you want to find out more (eg http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/software/page4765.cfm). There are other office type products out there, but they are not as popular and I am discounting online products like Google Docs due to our lack of broadband.

We have yet to decide between Microsoft Office and Open Office but thought you might be interested in some of the licensing issues. I have used both products for years and found them adequate and roughly interchangeable. But teachers and kids might have a different perspective.

E.T.

I can't recommend the starfall website enough - it's brilliant for infants to help learn phonics, and it's free. There is a sister website which I've signed up to for my class, it's more number based - www.more.starfall.com. It's about $35 a year but well worth it, I use both websites most days, both with the class group, and when the kids go on the computer in pairs. www.phonicsplay.co.uk is also a subscription website that's actually worth the fee.

teachtyw

The Irish Teaching and Learning Festival has a lot of links to resources you may find useful.

Moonbeam

Take a look at openoffice.org