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Comment by keithpeter | Hacker News Reader

I've had teenagers using a couple of netbooks in classes running 12.04. No fuss, just handed them the netbook to access Moodle course in-class during group work, along with a few College windows laptops.

No problem. Just needed a word about how clicking on the 'cog wheel' to close Firefox won't work (windows controls hidden until mouse over). They just clicked around the interface to find things.

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That's really what I expect from implementing Ubuntu in our current classrooms.

West Virginia is making a BIG push on the school districts to have a 1:1 student/computer ratio. Most districts going forward with it are purchasing netbooks to cut costs. Their technology budgets are already thin and they are desperately looking for ways of trimming even more to make room for more machines.

Campus wifi? A central server running Moodle as the VLE in each school? It could work very well for them. The further education college in which I work has Windows, but they have installed GIMP, Inkscape, Audacity college wide. Some great work with Audacity, people find GIMP a bit harder. Inkscape isn't used much (but then neither is Adobe Illustrator).

Most of the larger schools (Middle/High) already have campus wide wifi. Some of the larger elementary schools do as well. The big push right now is for VM Ware. Some of the counties are going to a district-wide WAN for serving up VMs from a central NOC.

That sounds great. Wifi/Internet enabled netbooks in a class one to a group can encourage discussion and carefully planned research if the teacher just thinks through the pedagogy a bit.

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