The Story
Kingfisher Lake ELDER Project
On December the 9th, I had the opportunity to visit Kingfisher First Nation, one of the communities who received the HP laptops from the Governor General’s Office. This trip would be my last before my return to Toronto and McMaster in January. Pete from KERC was kind enough to join me and assist with the ELDER installation as well.
Our plane was late from Sioux Lookout, but when we arrived we still had the great opportunity to run a presentation and tour of both Edubuntu and QIMO to the teaching staff. We also provided USBs with Open Education Disc for the teachers to try out, and everyone looked forward to seeing this software on the new laptops!
After signing into the Kingfisher hotel, we had a great team of Terry, Pete, Norman and I installing QIMO on the 10 HP netbooks and open source educational software on windows 7. The netbooks now have a Windows 7 with tons of great software and the ability to dual boot QIMO from startup. We also set up two users on QIMO; one for the teacher which was password protected, and one open user for the students.
That night we also set-up a mobile cart provided by K-NET to store and charge the laptops. The mobile lab was equipped with a lock on the front and 2 power bars at the back where you could charge laptops individually. There is also a hole where you can run the powercord for a projector that could sit on top of the cart. This is great not only to keep the laptops secure, but also easy to move around from classroom to classroom.
We also installed Edubuntu 10.10 (the latest version available from ubuntu) on the larger HP laptops and Elitebook (tablet PC) with Unity mode. Unity makes Edubuntu very user friendly with the dock on the side, and it makes Edubuntu a pleasure to navigate through, as I would put it “mac-like”. The installation of Edubuntu 10.10 was much faster and user friendly than 10.04.
The next morning we had the opportunity to showcase the laptops and mobile lab to a grade 5/6/7/8 combined class. The kids were very interested, especially since Tux (the Linux mascot) was similar to an online game that is very popular called Club Penguin. QIMO had a good reaction from the younger grade, while the interest of the older students geared towards Edubuntu.
Afterwards, we had to go to the band office to pick up the Toshiba laptops given by Schoolnet and bring them to the school for use. We found 6 toshiba 64 bit laptops – beautiful machines – and a great projector as well! After creating a 64 bit Edubuntu 10.10 USB for installation on these Toshibas, we bid Terry goodbye and boarded the flight back to Sioux Lookout.
Highlights of the Implementation:
- Installed QIMO on 10 netbooks, dual boot Windows 7 with open source educational software
- Installed Edubuntu 10.10 Unity with OFRIS on 8 laptops – 5 larger HP laptops and 3 Elitebooks - dual boot Windows 7 with open source educational software
- Open Education Disc was distributed amongst the teachers for use as well as installation on other machines.
- Assembled a mobile lab to store and cart the laptops
- Gave two presentations, one to teachers and then to a class to tour the different operating systems and software
- Left USBs for Terry, the IT worker, to install on the remaining computers and laptops
Some plans for the future:
- Bring manuals – some of the files are too big and can’t be downloaded from the website.
- BIOS is still the better way, especially
- Have longer workshops – engage the teachers into learning more and experimenting with the laptops. Or perhaps create a video tour of both operating systems for teachers to watch.
Overall, it was a very enjoyable and successful implementation – I hope to hear more from the school on how they’ve been using QIMO, Edubuntu and the Open Education USB!
