B.Y.O.D. and Me

Let me catch you up with the rather prosaic end of my technological life, and that's as the "support tech" of my wife's burgeoning classroom computer lab. 

If any of you have been in a college classroom lately, this is about what it looks like. And that's aside from the classes that students are taking online or coursework that they are doing in an electronic format. 

So yeah..... if you aren't either taking advantage of what's available, or better yet getting the students used to (and ready) to do work in this idiom, then you probably need to wake up, 'cus this is mostly how people work these days. 

Which is why "B.Y.O.D.", or bring your own device is the prevailing trend in schools today. What happened to school providing computers? Well; two things..... shrinking budgets, and web-delivery of content. Say what? Yeah, with the trend toward content being delivered via browsers through the Internet (the Cloud), content has become more and more platform agnostic. Meaning that the hardware and operating systems are largely irrelevant! These forces have combined to make institutions create an infrastructure for the student to get to the information, and allow the students themselves to get on there with whatever device that they happen to have.... kind of like the government building roads and letting you drive on there with whatever car you want to buy.

This is all fine and good at the high school (or even middle school) where I'm at. Parents can generally see the need for them to have a computer to take to school, but what about the little ones? Here in the Bermuda Triangle of education, just above the poverty line, rising expectations, and public pressure, we have a little problem. The schools in our demographic don't qualify for the mass of grants and government aid, or corporate PR programs that are out there. Parents are having a hard enough time to buy big brother or sis a tablet/laptop, much less one for 8-year-old. With the typical budget crunch, classrooms are looking more and more like my wife's which, as of yesterday has 23 kids assigned to it. In case you didn't know; that's A LOT for 3rd graders who need WAY more individual attention than my 14, 15, and 16 year olds! Meaning that she has a far greater use for a computer that she can put a student on to do independent practice while she's working with others, than I, who's students are far more likely to have them! This is the conundrum facing us in these last few days of summer as we get closer and closer to school starting.

Although, I've talked a little about it before, but I don't think I've completely discussed my brother's role in this little adventure. So here goes: as it got closer and closer to school starting and me facing the prospect of having "BunnyNet" (our name for her computer workgroup) looking more like last years poor little collection and any real improvements. Meanwhile my brother and I started having a back and forth about some old cameras. Any of you who read me regularly have probably figured out that he and I have the same hobbies. So briefly, since I don't want to go on at length about earlier posts, I asked him if he had any old ThinkPads that he needed to clean out (since he's cleaning out anyway). As the last post discussed, these machines arrived just in a nick-of-time to save the day. Pretty cool, although, he's probably less like a super-hero than Lucius Fox who invents all of Batman's cutting edge gear! Here is how it changed our situation.

Yup. This is it. It isn't the most exciting thing in the world, but it sure does make my life a lot nicer. You say; REALLY!?! .....Windows 7! Here's the deal: 

Twelve? That's the magic number! My wife has 23 students and 24 is pretty much the most that she could have period. So half of that is 12! She figures that she can divide her class in half after a concept has been taught, and work with 12 in "small group" while the other half can practice using laptops and any number of math programs, or the kids can pair up to use them as well. 

However, my number was 6! As the summer was winding down, I had about 6 machines, most of which were the old A31, mobile Pentium 4 ThinkPads that are pretty much limited to Windows XP. Nothing on XP, but it's really old and you can't run it now without Service Pack 3 if you expect to get updates, PLUS support ends next Spring! Some of you might being saying; why can't you run Linux on them? Great! I'll just have a bunch of low SE kids most of whom don't get on a computer regularly with a teacher who has never used Linux do THAT..... Yeah, that's what I thought.... which is why that group of machines from my brother became so important.

Although most people would turn up their nose at a 7 year old computer running a single core processor, these things are a life-saver to me! They'll run Windows 7! They use DDR2 ram (read much cheaper). They use SATA hard drives (read much cheaper). They're 6-7 years old (read much newer than 10 or 11)! Just to give you a run-down, before the reinforcements showed up, I had 3 A31s (one was partially working), 1 T30, 1 T42p, 1 Z61m, and 1 T60. The "Z61" series has essentially the same guts as the "T60" series. Now, BunnyNet has that plus 2 T43p (hardwarewise, basically between the T42 and T60), another T60 and another Z61. This gives her 10 laptops, plus the 2 school provided desktops allowing her to hit the magic "12", but more important to me, I'll have 6 of the 10 running on Windows 7 (once I get that T42p reloaded)! There are still a few machine here in "the shop" awaiting various parts, and those will allow me to replace the aged A31/T30 machines before XP support ends next Spring! The world is now as it should be..... at least, until the next techie emergency hits.