Swamped here at work

We're putting the five new classrooms together now, physically, and it's taking up most of our time.

Yesterday we finished the first classroom that's been put together and imaged with Ubuntu 6.10, Mark Helmsing. I'm excited to see what Mark does with it, as he's the one teacher that really integrates technology tools into his class already, without having a 1:1 computing environment.

He was the first major user when I set up a small Moodle box, and he basically single-handedly drove its turning into the beefy rack-mounted system our Corporate IS department cares for downtown, which is now available from outside our corporation firewall. He's still the main user of it today.

When I'm not putting computers together, I'm running around fixing things and doing tech support. So I'll be posting more interesting stuff when I get a chance to sit down and actually have some time to work on the design of our workstations.

In the meantime, Jorge Castro mentioned my blog (WooHoo!), and some Ohio LinuxFest people who found me through him decided that I should do a presentation on what I've been doing here next year.

Wow!

I even got the following e-mail from Jon "maddog" Hall, encouraging me to just go for it:

Simon,

> I just don't know, off the top of my head, what I could talk about that
> would be worthwhile.

I hear this over and over again, from people who have done fantastic things.

I heard it from the guy in St. Petersburg, Russia who was using Linux to run his
Steam Turbine Testing lab.  I encouraged him to write an article, and it made it to
the front page of the Linux Journal.

For some reason people seem to think that no one would care to listen to what they
did....too bad, since case studies (people talking about what they did) are the
number one selling tool in computer science.

I agree with Greg....go for it.

md

I'm going to.

Also, in Jorge's post, he seems to allude that maybe I should not move away from Edubuntu just because it doesn't provide us--in our particular current situation--anything except a few cool educational games. (Forgive me if I read something into nothing.)

In our particular current situation, the boxes are in English classrooms, and they're used mostly for web browsing (Like our Moodle) and word processing/presentations, anything extra on the desktop is just a game as far as the teachers are concerned.

What do you think?

I'm still subscribed to the edubuntu-devel list, and *almost* all the activity surrounds LTSP deployment, which is why I didn't figure it made much difference if we used Ubuntu or Edubuntu, I can always switch to Edubuntu at some future date if our situation changes so that Edubuntu can offer us something special, and we can actively contribute to that community.

Should I just keep the school on Edubuntu, simply because we're using Ubuntu in an educational setting, on the off chance that someday the program will spill over into non-English areas of the school?

Make yourself heard in the comments!