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On 19/01/12 22:08, paul sutton wrote: > On 19/01/12 21:17, Rob Beard wrote: >> On 19/01/12 20:46, bad apple wrote: >>> On 19/01/12 19:00, Gordon Henderson wrote: >>>> My experience over the years is that most people can not, and do not >>>> want to do a Windows/Linux/OSX install from scratch. They just don't >>>> care. They want to turn a computer on and have it "just work". >>> Well, sure, but I thought we were talking in the context of installs on >>> a Raspberry Pi board - if you're buying one for yourself, you better >>> know how to be able to install linux yourself because you are REALLY > I was under the impression they were selling pre-installed systems or sd > cards, well due to teh price its worth having one to use with the > pre-installed stuff and another one for experimenting with new > distributions etc. I think the pre-installed software will be very > developer orientated, > >>> not >>> the target audience otherwise. Of course for the main intended audience >>> (kids in school) then having a preinstalled SD card available would be >>> really handy otherwise the poor kids will spend more time trying to >>> figure out installation instead of actually learning programming or >>> whatever on them. But even then, their teacher bloody better well know >>> how to prep an image and have it ready to deploy or they are one >>> seriously poor IT teacher. > why, ? many primary schools have an IT co-ordinator, who thanks to the > way schools do IT ends up calling tech support because people like RM > lock down the system and or they are NOT allowed to change things but > the most basic settings. > > A lot of schools don't have a dedicated IT technician either, if > you look on the forum there is one school that has some older computers, > that hardly work properly teachers DO NOT Have time to fix stuff, I > think schools are really struggling and budget cuts are not going to > help either. > > Schools could install Linux but then could still think that each PC > capable of running windows MUST have a license, so that rules out > buying new hardware minus OS, raspberry PI could be a way round this. > I am aware becta were trying to sort this out before they were > disbanded, but it is a crazy situation, when schools are forced in to > Windows, of course they use Windows and office in secondary so > secondaries put them under pressure to ensure the kids can use office, > rather than teaching the basics of word processing and developing > confidence to pick up any word processing package and type on that. > > You still need staff to maintain it, would have to re-write all > your schemes of work and lesson plans around running libreoffice for > example. > > In general the IT co-ordinator has to teach other subjects in primary > anyway. In secondaries the teachers can simply teach IT, but still have > to contend with things breaking down, 5 mins before a lesson or having > to put up with the system taking so long to start up, they can't > deliver the whole lesson they have planned. > >> I think that might describe maybe 50% of IT teachers out there these >> days. From the people I've spoken to involved in schools, the IT >> teacher seems to be the one who knows how to use MS Office. Luckily >> for some schools the IT Teachers are a bit more clued up. > Well they are teaching MS office, unless schools have people who know > about alternatives. > > This is why I am not that convinced how well the new curriculum will > work, a lot of kids who want to do programming are doing so already so > end up ahead of the game. I can see kids who enjoy programming either > being dictated to on what they write, or getting fed up due to the tasks > given to them being too simple, (as you have to consider the whole class), > > Programming at that age used to be FUN which is why raspberry PI is > aiming to get kids back in to that mentality, all schools will care > about is getting people through exams, so it will end up here is what > you will use, here is what you will teach, and you could end up with > people leaving school confident in say visual basic, but lacking in > confidence to use other programming languages , as people have said > here, some office users panic if their place of work changes the > version of word to something else, > > Paul > Well, it's hard to disagree with anything you're saying here - so I won't. As a disclaimer, I have worked mostly in public sector stuff myself including some school-related IT projects, although always as an outside consultant/expert, certainly not as a teacher - additionally my Dad currently works part time as an exam invigilator in schools around the South West and he routinely tells me horror stories about computers never being ready for exams in time, login packet storms taking down the network halfway through, etc, etc: as you said, there's frequently a big struggle to find someone qualified onsite to fix anything but the most basic of problems. Certainly a lot of school based ICT staff seem to be limited to firing up the AD tools and brutally resetting everything until something miraculously works. And you're of course correct that individual schools have very little say indeed about a lot of their IT infrastructure, it normally being mandated from further up the chain (complete with all those horrid and expensive microsoft licenses). I still vehemently contest that a teacher that is hosting a class on programming on the Raspberry Pi better have done their homework and know how to admin them to a certain extent: when the first kid trashes their OS with some errant experimental code the teacher is really going to have to know how to either reflash the SD card back to defaults or fix it in a more sophisticated manner. It would be like me teaching high level remote exploit coding to a class and then not being able to fix or restore-to-snapshot the victim test VMs when they bluescreen! I'm totally behind the idea of these Raspberry Pis though - current IT education in schools is a national joke/disgrace, computers are too expensive and there is not enough cheap fun in IT in general. Let's hope the bloody kids learn something instead of checking their damn facebook status on their smartphones all lesson... Regards, Mat -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq