Testimonials wanted... students and professors/teachers

[defishguy]

I'm a computer repair / networking instructor at Eastside Technical Center in Lexington, Ky. It is a Technical High School.

My staff workstation and all of my lab machines run 9.04. I built a complete workstation and used Remastersys to duplicate the installation on the other 19 lab machines. This saved a lot of configuration time on the back end.

Currently my students authenticate to AD on a Windows domain using the Likewise Open AD client. I know there are other ways to accomplish authentication but this was the chosen method due to it's similarities with the Mac clients my students also must work with.

I manage my lab using a combination of ClusterSSH, Webmin, and iTalc. ClusterSSH, and Webmin's clustering features are incredibly useful, and iTalc assists me in making sure that my students are on task and not on MySpace.

I use VirtualBox to create and distribute virtual machines of whatever Win32 platform I happen to be teaching them using Azureus and the built in tracker. This obviously allows me to distribute massive files to the lab very very quickly. Some of those Win32 images are over 12GB (read: Vista) and rsync is just a pita. It's much easier to teach the students to download the torrent.

What has this meant to me? Well given that my students are technically inclined to begin with using Windows XP (district standard) on my workstations meant that I was forever dealing with malware on thumb drives, the inability to alter the default district security policies when those policies were counter productive, and the inability to explore and teach new platforms conveniently. With the students using Jaunty for daily work and using Windows for that part of their education that requires it we feel (the students and I) that they have a much higher skill set leaving my class than they otherwise might have.

The flexibility of Linux also meant that I can use ClusterSSH or Webmin to quickly start and stop (if need be) and and all applications that were running in the lab that I didn't want to be running. From an additional lab-management perspective it also meant that my machines would stay running, and stay stable through-out the school year, something I couldn't say running Windows. In fact running Windows often meant a twice yearly reinstall.

While I know that purists would prefer OpenOffice.org I tend to use Google Docs for my assignments. The realtime and anywhere collaboration capabilities are priceless and I don't have to carry around their assignments on paper.

It works. I have documented that last year alone I saved the school district over $2500 in software that the district did not have to purchase with no loss of functionality or variance from the curriculum. Examples range from Adobe Acrobat, to Synchroneyes.

Every year I have students that will leave Windows for Linux, and actually become part of the community. This Saturday (July 18th)I'll be spending an afternoon with my Loco and two already graduated students. It's a good feeling.

There is more that I've done. I've created a custom mandatory policy file that Webmin automagically copies to the workstations every day or on demand that allows me to have an analog to GPOs in the Windows world.

No problems, extremely effective lab management, good stewardship of taxpayer funds, diversified student learning, expanded class time due to decreased management time are just a few of the many reasons why my lab runs Jaunty and will continue to run Linux.