project evagoras i & ii 1 pc per classroom until year 2002 3 pcs per classroom until year 2008...

Project Evagoras I & II

1 PC Per Classroom until year 2002

3 PCs Per Classroom until year 2008

30+ computers per school

NO SUPPORT PERSONNEL

Prospects…

• 500 + Servers by the year 2008 in Primary Education

• 15 000 + Clients (Thin Clients or Fat Clients) by the year 2008 in Primary Education

‘Apoplous’ Research

2001-2002: 1 Computer for every 4 students

2002-2003: 1 Computer per desk

Windows 98/Office XP

Linux/OpenOffice/StarOffice (2003)

Problems Identified

Having a Lab inside a classroom requires heavy maintenance

A lot of failures can occur (hardware or otherwise)

Any disturbance in the teams leads to negative learning results!

Proposed Solution

Move from Fat Clients to Thin Clients

Investigate Computer Recycling (June 2004)

Work with H.T.E. (Sun Microsystems Cyprus) for a possible solution

Evaluate K12LTSP (Fedora Core/LTSP)

Year 1: 2004-2005

One school, 200+ students

One Classroom, 28 students

14 Clients (Pentium II/Celeron) with LAN cards that support PXE

K12LTSP Server

OpenOffice 2.0 / StarOffice 8.0 (Betas)

COLLABORATION

ConclusionsEven a modest server (Intel P4 @ 3GHz with 2GB RAM) can run up to 15 clients

OpenOffice/StarOffice serious MS Office replacements

Fedora Linux offers an extremely user friendly environment

WINE can compensate in the (few) cases where proprietary software is not available on Linux!

Sharing The IdeasThe ‘apoplous’ web site went online early 2004Early 2005 moved to ‘Moodle’May 2005 released the first ‘OpenEducation’ Report

OpenEducation Reports

Bimonthly

Great comments from many sources!

Updating with new content and new columnists!

Reporting Research

Published two books:Using Windows/MS Office (100 pages)Using Linux/OpenOffice (261 pages)Both can be downloaded from www.apoplous.org

Year 2: 2005- 2006

4 Schools

1 school equipped with SunRay 170s

3 schools equipped with Intel-based PCs used as Thin Clients with Fedora Core/LTSP

Classroom of Tomorrow

March 2006 - June 2006 (Pilot Study)

September 2006 - June 2007 (Implementation)

1 SunRay per student

Interactive whiteboard

‘Digital Days’

Digital Curriculum through an LMS

How it works:

L.O.

LMS

StudentsContent

Forums

GradesParent

sTeacher

Q & A 1

Are SunRays/ Thin Clients the Ultimate Solution for school computer labs?

Answer:

YES!

Q & A 2

Are SunRays / Thin Clients the Ultimate Solution for the ‘one client per child’ school?

Answer:

NO!

Why Not?

Too restrictive!

Too many cables!

Still rely too heavily on the keyboard for input!

A look into the future...

Fastest ‘Personal’ Computer:Apple PowerMac G5 ‘Quad’

21.0 Gigaflops

Sony Playstation 32 TerraFlops!

“The Power of a Warehouse full of

standard PCs in a box that fits on the top

of your desk”

Thanks for participating!