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High School Students Develop Linux Imaging and Help Desk Software

Posted by timothy on from the but-did-they-learn-anything dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A Pennsylvania school district is going Linux and building an open source high school with the help of student technology apprentices. As part of a 1:1 laptop learning program, 1725 high school students at Penn Manor School District are receiving new laptops running Ubuntu and open source software exclusively. Central to the program is a student help desk where student programmers created a Linux multicast imaging system titled Fast Linux Deployment Toolkit. The district posted pictures of the imaging process in action. Working alongside school IT staff, students also developed help desk software and other programs in support of the 1:1 student laptop program. The student tech apprentices also provide peer support for fellow students."

4 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Re:GH link by jetole · · Score: 5, Informative

    The correct link is https://github.com/pennmanor/F...

    This is a typo in the story posting and I contacted /. admin to hopefully have them resolve this.

  2. Re:What about the windows only software? and offic by Nerdfest · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I look at it the other way. Microsoft products do not fully work with open formats. Public institutions really should be using open formats.

  3. THAT'S education by emaname · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Kudos to that school's admin staff. This is a real educational experience. You can't beat hands-on. Plus the students are engaged in the operation of their school; IOW they have some ownership or at least a partnership.

    I agree with the comments re compatibility. MS is the odd-man-out. They've been forcing their proprietary stuff on the world for too long. And innovation has been stunted as a result of their dominance. My peers and I witnessed time and again in the 80's when someone would come out with a great idea and then MS would buy them and the great idea would disappear so there would be no competition in the marketplace.

    Re...

    open office does not fully work with office files

    To be more specific, that comment must be with re to macros because I've never had any problems and I still don't.

    I did a lot of support work for a one of the divisions of a large, world-wide corporation. One of the things I did was edit/fix Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. I pulled the files into OpenOffice, fixed all the formatting, spelling, grammar, calculation, and punctuation mistakes and then exported the files back to the appropriate MS Office file format. Nobody knew and I always received compliments re how nice everything looked. As a matter of fact, I did most of that work on a Mac and later on Linux. And, of course, that corporation was Windows only.

    It still brings a smile to my face. They were paying huge sums of money for their licenses and here I was using an open-source solution to fix all their problems.

    --
    An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
  4. Re:What about the windows only software? and offic by symbolset · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What about viruses, anti viruses, malware and antimalware? Novell network compatibility? Flash and Silverlight, IE and Exchange compatibility - and persistent mutual incompatibility? Patch Tuesday and its need to intercept updates, test against your set of mission critical apps before rolling them out and then triage and treat the inevitable undiscovered issues? Recurrent planned obsolescence? SharePoint and pirated Photoshop? Landsharks? Goblin invasion?

    It appears they have chosen to operate in a domain where these problems don't exist. Good on 'em.

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    Help stamp out iliturcy.