The Story

The Fort Severn Story

Fort Severn is the most northern community in Ontario; on the 15^th, I had the pleasure of flying there to install ELDER as well as distribute an Open Education USB with Open Source software for Windows.

Fort Severn is a beautiful place in the air, and it was my first time experiencing the tundra:

The town is absolutely picturesque:

At Wahaso Cree Elementary School, I had the opportunity to install Edubuntu in a new way, through Wubi. There were 11 working computers in the classroom, some of which didn’t even have Microsoft office nor the ability to print from the computer lab printer:

Some of the highlights of the implementation:

• Estimated time of installation: 5 hours. The installation methodology through Wubi (the Ubuntu installer within the windows system) is actually faster, though it requires more reboots and quite a number of steps to complete. This process involves installing Ubuntu through Wubi as a windows program, updating it through Keryx, and then installing Edubuntu and other packages through the synaptic package manager.
• Minimal downloading was required; however, the packages need to be ensured that they are complete (for some reason, some deb. Files were still missing and needed to be downloaded.
• Successfully installed Edubuntu 10.04 on all 11 desktops
• Successfully installed OFRIS (Linux “Deepfreeze”) on all 11 desktops, with a “student” user being frozen
• The printer was very easy to hook up, all the computers could print at the end of the installation – can’t do that with Windows XP!
• The Open Education Disc was quite popular with the teachers because of the great amount of educational content for windows that was available, as well as the easy download. Perhaps KERC could include an open education USB with each of the packages they send to the school?

What is the best way to implement open source software in schools? Because of the popularity of open education USB, perhaps this can be the widest and cost-effective implementation in remote schools. This way, teachers can bring the USBS back home to learn more about the capabilities of the individual programs, as well as being leant out for students to install at their own computers at home. Nonetheless, there are strong advantages in having a dual-boot Linux computer lab, and the USBs for self-learning and exploration.

Some plans for the future:

• Bring more open education USBs!
• Utilize Wubi as the default installer
• Print out instruction manuals to leave behind to help guide teachers with Edubuntu.

Overall, it was a great implementation and I hope to hear from Fort Severn on how they’ve been using Edubuntu and the Open Education USB!