Doesn't work for learning. These children are more focused on social networking, you hand a kid a computer and he can show you a flash game or facebook with ease. But then you show them a word processor and they look puzzled.
@Joshua Unless you give them PCs with Ubuntu, using XP is another mistake in many districts that do this. XP is 11 years old... time to upgrade.
Alright, I'm going to go swimming, I'll be back around seven.
@Flabricorn I agree with you about the word processor thing, Our district has been slowly rolling out Windows 7 machines, and soon to be Windows 8 I imagine... but the majority of the machines in the district still have Windows XP simply because they don't meet the minimum requirements for Windows 7.
It wouldn't be cost effective to upgrade all their hardware.
@Joshua Our district ordered Win 7 pro machines, Win7 already on there, and then formatted everything with a preloaded XP so the curriculum would already be on there.
They have no consistency because all they do (the district no the IT guys) is appeal to the parents by "investing" in the learning of the students with "21st century skills" when they all already have a smartphone, and these computers are in no way consistent.
The little ones get Macbooks, the older ones iPads, and then the high schoolers are given Dell netbooks with XP.
Another thing we told them was, that if they where going to issue laptops to all the students in the district then they where going to have to higher another IT person, because we already support over 1000 devices, and can hardly keep up as it is...
I don't know how big your district is, but we have 4 learning centers and they are all 10+miles away from each other, so 15-20 minutes (depending on traffic). And we never seem to be in the building that needs us...
i use jrgifford, jamesgifford or some mutation thereof (hence jrg) almost everywhere.
then again, i don't hang out in the shadier parts of the internet.
however, i will say that my irc nick is jrgifford everywhere I go. Then again, I tend to stick in the #ubuntu*, #ruby or #rails namespace on irc, so... :)
