Netbooks for education

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Permalink Reply by Learning Today on March 24, 2009 at 7:46am

Hi Kim,
I'm not with a district, but wanted to share that I work with a netbook as they are used in various school districts I work with and I love it... Specially because I'm always on the road training teachers and they are very familiar with netbooks so I use it with them for our product training and demonstration as our applications run great in netbooks.
My understanding from some of the districts I work with is that the are very inexpensive for the schools and they are great for kids. They also like the netbooks better than smaller devices such as the iPod touches etc because they are not as easy to break, disappear, etc.
Hope this helps a little! ;)

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Permalink Reply by Pam McLeod on March 30, 2009 at 7:30am

Hi Kim,

I'd be happy to talk with you anytime - we received a competitive state grant (Title IID funds) for a 1:1 netbook program in our 4th grade (63 students). We are also using some with specific Special Education students, and have some staff members using netbooks. We are using both XP and Linux models, although the 1:1 grant is all Linux. We selected the Dell Mini 9 with Ubuntu Linux. So far, it's been a fabulous program - we are just about a month into it. You can see a short presentation I did last week at http://tinyurl.com/acsNetbook.

New Hampshire had a netbook workshop last Friday and saw products from various vendors. HP has an enterprise-class netbook now which is has a more durable case and enterprise-quality parts. It's more expensive ... a $500 netbook rather than a $250 one. But I really like that concept for schools, where the netbooks are going to get some abuse.

Pam

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Permalink Reply by Roland Gesthuizen on March 31, 2009 at 4:16pm

I have just penned this one page flier that explains to our teaching staff some of the key differences between netbooks and laptops. You can view an online version here
http://tr.im/hZ92

I welcome any feedback or suggestions. :-)

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Permalink Reply by Karl Smithe on April 28, 2009 at 4:11pm

Have you heard of Vero Beach High School?

They had a successful remedial system for at-risk students back in 1987. The computers did a better job of getting kids to score on the GED then the regular education system. But this system started in 1987. What kind of computers did they have in 1987? Intel did not introduce the 486 until 1989 and the Pentium in 1993.

http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/v...

These Netbooks are around 10 times as powerful as the original Pentiums.

So if the Vero Beach program could work in 1987 how could these netbooks not make a BIG IMPACT. It is a question of figuring out what to do with them and sharing information. The schools teach us to compete and this means most people hide information from each other. That is what we need to stop.

psik

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