I spent a school year interning at a public school in the South Bronx in 2008-09. They had a basement full of PowerPC vintage iMacs that were just gathering dust. I spent HOURS trying to get a decent build of Ubuntu (actually Edubuntu) working on just one of them, but never could. Like the article says, picking up old computers was a breeze, by simply tell people on craigslist that you are picking up their old computers for underprivileged kids and they will carry the equipment to your car.
Eventually, I had to cave to the pressures of the job and purchased an external hard drive and taught the lab manager how to ghost the computers using the Windows XP that was already installed on the computers. She was thrilled, and would run from computer to computer, ghosting them at least once a week. Sigh.
Just like any other teaching tool, Powerpoints can be used well, and not so well, depending on the teacher. My current Economics teacher is one of the worst imaginable, he is completely disconnected from the material, and basically reads the slides from the textbook. But, the man is such a zero, he would be an awful teacher one-one-one with pen and paper.
To go to the opposite extreme, I had a legendary Computer Science teacher who would Google for the slides he would use at the start of each lesson. He generally pulled them from a large university, and I don't think that he pre-screened the slides at all. That said, I learned more from his "borrowed" Powerpoint presentation than with nearly any other professor in my 3.5 years of college so far.
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I spent a school year interning at a public school in the South Bronx in 2008-09. They had a basement full of PowerPC vintage iMacs that were just gathering dust. I spent HOURS trying to get a decent build of Ubuntu (actually Edubuntu) working on just one of them, but never could. Like the article says, picking up old computers was a breeze, by simply tell people on craigslist that you are picking up their old computers for underprivileged kids and they will carry the equipment to your car. Eventually, I had to cave to the pressures of the job and purchased an external hard drive and taught the lab manager how to ghost the computers using the Windows XP that was already installed on the computers. She was thrilled, and would run from computer to computer, ghosting them at least once a week. Sigh.
Just like any other teaching tool, Powerpoints can be used well, and not so well, depending on the teacher. My current Economics teacher is one of the worst imaginable, he is completely disconnected from the material, and basically reads the slides from the textbook. But, the man is such a zero, he would be an awful teacher one-one-one with pen and paper. To go to the opposite extreme, I had a legendary Computer Science teacher who would Google for the slides he would use at the start of each lesson. He generally pulled them from a large university, and I don't think that he pre-screened the slides at all. That said, I learned more from his "borrowed" Powerpoint presentation than with nearly any other professor in my 3.5 years of college so far.