Taste of Tech

A little shameless self-promotion here. A few weeks ago I was talking online with some other ed-tech people, and Alvin repeated his assertion that if you Google “Alvin technology” he comes up as the first link. That, of course, led us to all to start Googling ourselves, an activity that was fun until I arrogantly pointed out that when you Google “John Schinker,” every link on the first page is about me. Ryan grumbled something about me having an unusual name, and we moved on to something else.

So tonight, I Googled myself to see how many links I’d have to go through to get to one that’s not about me. (I did warn you about the self-promotion, right? Besides, I’m sure you do this all the time.)

As it turns out, the 20th item in the list is not about me. I’m not one of the Iowa Sportsmen and Sportswomen for Edwards. Then, the streak continues for another 20 or so links until there are several that aren’t about me.

In the process of doing all of this, though, I was surprised to learn a few things. Cathy Evanoff wrote a nice article about their Read Across America activities back in March, in which I played a very small role. I apparently still have a personal home page (that I’m not going to link to), which was last updated before my six-year-old was born. And I was featured in a Computerworld article earlier this month about Linux in schools. Who knew? All I did was answer a couple emails, and there I am.

So… umm… thank you, all you nice people who have been saying favorable things about me on the Internet. Now, go Google yourself and see what you’ve been up to.

One of the interesting things to come out in the Beta Survey was a shift in how teachers are using technology and a shift in the availability of technology to students. Teachers reported that they’re spending more time on Internet-based activities, both to provide instruction and to use as a research tool. The most-often-used technologies are now Internet for Instruction, Internet for Research, Word Processing, and Drill and Practice. We’re not doing so much with Spreadsheets, Desktop Publishing, or Simulations, and student use of technology in all of those areas is declining in our district.

Teachers also reported that technology is less readily available to students. On average, 13.5% of our teachers reported that the technology is not available to students for academic work in the categories I mentioned. This is an increase from the 2005 survey, when 10.5% said the technology is not available.

Over the intervening two years, we improved the student-to-computer ratio in our district from 6.5 to 5.8. That’s a 12% increase in technology availability for students. While that’s not a bad improvement, it’s clearly not keeping pace with the demand.

In order to make real improvements in these areas, we need to either spend more money on technology, reduce the amount of money we’re spending per computing device, or keep computers in service longer.

Given the gloomy financial outlook for the district, it is unlikely that we’re going to see any kind of substantial, transformational change in technology funding within the next several years. We have been looking at two possibilities for spending less money on computing devices recently. The first is the little laptop. While there are several options available, we’ve been considering the Asus eeePC. While our teacher certainly have concerns about the durability and sustainability of these machines, we like them well enough to move forward with a pilot project. If they can really do most of what we need at half the price of a desktop computer while throwing in portability, it would be a bargain.

The second is the nComputing X-300 system. In the right classroom situation, a card could be added to the teacher’s computer allowing three additional monitors, keyboards, and mice to use the system simultaneously. This would allow up to four people to use a single computer at a time. While there are some performance tradeoffs, the initial tests look promising. The system costs about $200, and we’re going to be trying it with a couple new classroom computers we’re installing. We would use old monitors and keyboards that we have on-hand to keep costs down. Several area school districts are using these effectively already.

In the area of improving access to technology by keeping it in service longer, we’re looking at several different products. Two interesting Linux distributions are designed to run with a minimal amount of memory and processing power. Linpus Lite is designed to run on low end hardware, and looks a lot like the interface on the eeePC. It’s only a live CD at this point, so it’s not very practical for use in a classroom yet. But it’s worth keeping an eye on. Meanwhile, gOS is the software the came pre-loaded on the Everex $200 Wal-Mart computers last fall. Again, it’s designed to give a lot of performance without needing fancy hardware.

Either of these might be used on older computers to allow people to continue to make productive use of them even after they’re too slow to run Windows with all of the bells and whistles. We’re also starting to play with nLite, which allows us to build a customized Windows install that leaves out a lot of components we don’t need. This will allow Windows to run with fewer performance issues on older hardware. While we can’t do much about aging hardware going bad, we can at least try to keep working computers in service longer.

All of this adds up to a more concerted effort to maximize our technology investments. While these measures certainly aren’t substitutes for adequate funding, we may be able to get more useful technology into the hands of our students this way.

I received our Asus eeePCs yesterday. After playing with a couple at the tech conference last week, I thought it would be worth the investment to try a few out in the district. I bought one for each building, plus one for my techs to share and one for me to play with. That’s a total of eight.

I purposefully didn’t pre-configure anything. I simply put two lists of questions in the box, and delivered them to the tech team members in each building. The first list was a list of questions that already have answers:

What is this?
This is an Asus eeePC 4G Surf. It’s a small, low end laptop with a 7” screen. There’s no hard drive – just 4GB of flash memory that holds the operating system and applications. It has 512 MB of RAM. You can save data to an SD card or to a USB flash drive. It has a productivity suite (word processor, spreadsheet, etc.). It also has a web browser and can access the network wirelessly or wired. It has an external VGA port, so it could be connected to a larger monitor or to a projector.

Can I keep it?
For now. One was purchased for each of the schools, the technology coordinator, and the tech department. By the end of the school year, we hope to have determined what role (if any) these devices can play in our schools. At that point, we may decide to collect them all and put them in the same place so students can use them.

In the meantime, use it. Share it with teachers and administrators and students. Figure out if it’s a useful tool or just a gadget. Try to think about the questions that need answers. We’ll be discussing them at the April (and maybe May) tech team meetings.

Will it run Successmaker / Kid Pix / Accelerated Reader / Keyboarding software?
No.

Then what good is it?
This device will do most of the things we need computers to do. You can word process, create presentations, use the web, and access network resources (file servers, printers, etc). When you think about what most people use computers for most of the time, this little laptop can do most of it.

How much does it cost?
It costs $367.37. Price-wise, it’s about half the cost of a desktop computer and a third of the cost of a traditional laptop. Compared to the Alphasmart Neo, it’s about 50% more expensive. So for the same cost as 30 Neos, you could have 20 of these. At the secondary level, it’s about 3 times the cost of a graphing calculator, and only slightly more than an ebook reader.

It seems like this little machine has a lot of value given the things it can do and the relatively low price point.

The second list was a list of questions that need answers. I fully expect this list to grow, but right now, this is it:

Does this device work well enough to have a place in our schools?

How could this be used effectively with students?

What limitations are there that would affect its usefulness?

Are there solutions to overcome those limitations?

What technical hurdles would have to be overcome to make the use of these devices successful?

If we were to start using these computers, what could they replace? What could we buy fewer of to make this cost effective?

Are these computers durable enough for student use?

Is Linux too complicated / different / cumbersome / annoying to be used in this environment?

I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’m still trying to get my mind around the changes that are happening in computer hardware. One of the major impacts of the One Laptop Per Child project is that it has focused attention on inexpensive, no-frills hardware. Through December 31, you can still take advantage of the buy-one, give-one promotion. For $400, you get an XO laptop to keep, and a child in a third world country gets one too.

But let’s say you want to give a bunch of laptops to a school. If you’re giving 1,000 of them, you can do so for $249 each. Plus, you get to pick the school where they’re going to go. There aren’t any stated restrictions about where the school has to be. While the details of the program might stipulate that the school can’t be in the United States, it’s not ruled out by the preliminary information on the web site.

Another option is the Asus EeePC. The low end models run for $299 in the US, but I’d bet that price would come down if you were buying a thousand at a time. Meanwhile, Intel’s ClassMate is in the same price range. And with the Sinomaniac and Longmeng projects taking shape in China, you can bet that competition is going to grow, making the machines more powerful and driving the prices down.

So what do all of these machines do? In general, they’re laptops — small laptops. They have 7″ screens, relatively slow processors, and flash memory instead of hard drives. Most of them use Linux as the operating system instead of Windows. This keeps the system requirements down while virtually eliminating software license costs. The computers can access the web, do email, and use productivity software (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation package, etc). They also typically have bundled “educational” software, which likely varies widely in quality.

What don’t they do? I would expect that they would have problems with multimedia. Certainly audio and video editing would be a problem. They’re not going to run proprietary Windows software, so there won’t be as many software options. Support for peripherals will likely be limited. And they’re certainly not as speedy as the latest offerings from the big computer makers. Are these dealbreakers?

Economically, it may be possible to do a 1:1 program with these devices. Right now, our students are spending $120 for a graphing calculator. There’s no reason why that device couldn’t be emulated, and that would make up half of the cost right there. If we could substantially reduce the number of desktop computers available in the schools for student use, we could save $20 per student per year. Assuming they keep the laptops for several years, that would make up part of the difference. Then, if we leverage some of the benefits of a 1:1 program by using more online resources and fewer print resources (we spend a LOT of money on textbooks), it suddenly puts these things within reach.

Would this really fly? I don’t know. We already face a lot of criticism for having outdated technology (Why aren’t you running Vista? What do you mean we can’t use PowerPoint 2007?) Running Linux would make these problems a lot worse. Much of the software we currently use wouldn’t work. And supporting that many computers — both from a hardware perspective and a network one — would be a daunting task. But a project like this is a lot more feasible than it was a year ago.

I’ve been struggling lately with situations where we seem to be using technology for its own sake. Sometimes, it seems like we use technology just to show we’re using technology, or to show that we’re beeing innovative, or cutting edge. But sometimes, technology just makes things more complicated than they really need to be, or it provides a small benefit for an enormous cost of complexity.

A few years ago, every meeting I went to involved someone doing a PowerPoint presentation. I think they were all really excited and proud of themselves for knowing how to use PowerPoint, and we’d get to see all the new transitions and animations and effects they’d just discovered. Thankfully, we’ve mostly moved on.

A few weeks ago, EdTechWeekly had its Video Extravaganza (and the subsequent Video Extravaganza II, in which yours truly played a role). This is normally an audio program. We certainly have plenty of technology going around, with the Skype calls, Shoutcast streaming, Audacity recording, java-based chat client, and multiple browser windows. Throw in the occasional Yugma screen sharing application, and you have a respectable level of technology sophistication, even for the hard core tech omnivores.

But no, we have to do video, too. so we stumbled through the challenges of broadcasting live video (it really is much easier than it was even a year ago). The bandwidth requirements meant the audio was worse than normal, and the audience was more focused on Jeff swiveling in his chair than on what anyone was saying. The next week we repeated the experiment. I had acquired a webcam by then, but hadn’t worked out the lighting. The video worked, but the quality was pretty bad. 0ave was still having trouble with Ubuntu, so we couldn’t get video from him. The next week, we decided to go back to the low-tech audio-only version, much to the relief of some of the listeners.

Sure, the video was an experiment. We wanted to play with Ustream, and this was a good way to do it. As I’m frequently quoted as saying, EdTechWeekly should be groundbreaking and cutting edge. But it didn’t add much to the show. Viewers basically got to see the hosts looking at their computer screens while talking about the links. Some viewers also noticed that we don’t really pay attention to each other on the show when someone else is talking. But the additional technology — and bandwidth — needed to produce and watch the show didn’t really add anything.

I’m writing this — perhaps ironically — on the computer running Ubuntu. A month ago, I started an experiment to see if I could use a Linux box for my primary computer. As it turns out, I can’t. Or, at least, it’s not worth the effort it would take. I can get most things to work reasonably well. With a lot of work, I can get it to perform almost as well as a Windows computer. But when I buy new computers, they come with Windows. I’m not going to save anything by buying them without Windows. Sure, I buy Microsoft Office. But with the volume licensing deal, we’re only paying $64 for a copy of Office. The saved headaches are well worth that. So we’re not going to replace Windows as a desktop operating system any time in the near future. Next week, I’ll be reformatting this computer so I can start working on the next project. That may be thin client computing, or VMWare, or something completely different. But I’ve answered the question about Linux for now.

And on it goes. The technologies keep coming. Are wireless networks worth the cost and complexity? Will this intervention software really teach this kid to read, where good teachers have failed for the last three years? Does Moodle provide anything that can’t be done more easily in the traditional classroom? Are there any benefits to using social networking software in a school? Should we be giving email accounts to students, or will that create more problems than it solves? Do wikis have a role in education? Are the kids really going to get anything out of the OpenSim project that they couldn’t get in less time with simpler tools?

When my kids were little, they had one of those Shape-O toys, where you put the shapes into the ball by matching them up with the right holes. Every toddler picks up a shape and tries it in every hole until they find the right one. Sometimes, I think that’s what we’re doing with technology — trying all the pieces in all the holes, until we find one that works.