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One Desktop per Child - miniPCs for Schools?
gwjenkins asks: "I'm a teacher in charge of IT in a small school. We would like to bust out of the computer lab model but don't want a trolley of laptops wheeled from class to class. I've drooled over wi-fi PDAs but just can't afford a set for class (and the batteries drain too fast). In a classroom, space is at a premium and teachers won't use a technology that takes too long to set up. Most of the time the kids are just researching (Google), or typing (Google Docs), the rest of the time they can go to a lab. I would love to have a desk-based solution. Can you run a wi-fi mini-pc (sitting under the desk) from a 12-volt rechargeable battery (also sitting under the desk) with a 7" LCD (sitting on the desk), that boots from flash card into FireFox? No wires! No setup time! Has anyone done this? How? Alternatively can anyone say why this is silly?"
Have you checked the one laptop per child project ??
http://www.olpc.com/
http://www.laptop.org/
Or else try a search for
tablet thin client
We used to use sun rays at our old school. They cost like $250 bucks a piece and we were able to remote login to a windows server through solaris. I also would be curious to know if anyones ever tried to use some of those mini-itx boards. I think you could probably build a system for under $250 and those things have at least a 1ghz processor. If you ran Linux thats plenty.
"Alternatively can anyone say why this is silly?"
Because students learn less when there's a computer in front of them. There's a place for computers, and computer education, and learning to use them as tools. It's not in most classrooms.