I have successfully had two Netbooks on my wireless network at home, but each time I had to connect with an Ethernet cable to my router FIRST, then run all updates before it connected.
Does this help anyone?
Predictably, we’ve had some damage to a couple of netbooks. That, though, has led to the discovery that they’ve an almost Lego-like construction which to date is making a specialist repair service unnecessary.
Armed with nothing more than a cheap set of watchmaker’s screwdrivers, we’ve been able to quickly swap keyboards and display screens between machines. One had a damaged on-off switch which wasn’t readily repairable, another had a keyboard with coffee poisoning and another had a flickery screen. By swapping parts, we now have one rather sad donor machine, and the other two back in normal service. If you’re not sure what to do, there’s a wealth of guidance online.
This may be factor worth considering in selection of equipment for schools, but it’s not one we’d considered prior to the project. This simplicity of construction, enabling dismantling without any need for specialist tools, looks like it brings hardware repairs within the scope of anyone with a bit of hardware experience. It’s certainly a factor we’d take into account in future.
Today we’ve had a report of some problems with students getting netbooks connected to home wireless networks, so have produced a short guidance note to try to help. You can also find it in the list of Pages in the sidebar.
Here’s how the problem was described:
Some pupils are also having problems connecting their netbooks at home, are there clear guidelines that we could send home to help them? They say a network key is blocking them or something, any ideas??
This suggests the home wireless networks have been configured to be secure, so the netbooks are prompting for the network key. The note decribes what’s going on, and provides and example of how to find out the key value for a BT “Home Hub” system.
This is something that the students don’t need to know about in school. We had hoped that we wouldn’t need to provide support for connection to home networks, beyond the Asus Guide, available from Downloads link, but this suggests some guidance on this would have been helpful to parents.
We have been using the netbooks for a few weeks now and they have become an important part of P5 Classroom life. The children have been enjoying them and most parental feedback is positive.
One parent was concerned her child would get mugged if taking the Eee Pc home/to school and withdrew support to take it home. Another commented on our site that we should delete all the games (although several replies have backed up use of educational and fun games).
There have only been a few problems and the majority of the time almost all of the Eee PCs perform well:
However, the majority of problems are solved simply by simple things that the teacher and/or pupil can do such as restarts which is much better than having to wait on a visit from IT.
We are going to be looking at saving work on line (they do not connect to the server) using GLOW and/or Google docs. They were never intended to save lots of work on but the other day I was so keen to solve a problem with a quick restore I deleted a pupil’s work!!
Teachers are still concerned about charging and printing but are enjoying them and seeing the benefits.
Keep checking the school site for updates on things the children are doing. You may also find the comments useful.
You can go to the King’s Meadow Site and click on the eee-pc-east-lothian-pilot category or click here.
As we start our second week of this project I would like to give some feedback. The children are loving it. Their knowledge and ability to use these computers is amazing. For example, they are showing each other how to change background colours and some of my class have even been playing games together over the network!
As mentioned in David’s post, my class has had one faulty netbook which is being attended too. A couple of them have had frozen screens or problems easily fixed by a restart.
One good thing about this is how easy it is to get the children to fix problems without the teacher. We are so used to them running up to use with faulty iBooks (even though we say not to). Some of them are still doing this, but in most cases they can be shown that the simple process of holding down the power button and restarting fixes things. A couple of them have not connected to the internet immediately and a couple have had problems requiring restoring the netbooks to factory settings.
Generally however, they are a lot more reliable than the iBooks and most problems can be resolved in class.
The children are still being very repsonsible. Although charging has not been a major issue, some children’s netbooks have ran out of power early on in the mornung and had to be charged. The children have been reminded to charge them at home if they can. Although my personal belief is we do not need charging cabinets as they are not being charged at school for a while/overnight, it woudl be helpful to extension bar sockets or shelves iin our P5 common area so they can be charged if necesary.
My class has not yet printed anything from the USB connection in the area printer. I will check and report back if any other classes have done this.
One parent has withdrawn allowing the child to take the netbook home as she fears the child will get mugged on the way home from school.
As David said, the netbooks are becoming as common place in the P5 classroom as a pencil case and pencils. Long may it continue!
Although my Parents’ night this evening was just for a small number of parents, the Netbook pilot was a topic of conversation most parents brought up. All comments were favourable and it would appear that all the parents who spoke about this to Mrs Philp and myself were saying they thought it was wonderful and their child was very enthusiastic.
A couple did ask for guidance about how to connect to the internet, as we have not yet told the children at school how to do this at home. However it would appear that a good percentage of the children have managed to connect at home, even without instruction from school.
It’s still early days for the project, but it’s striking how the netbooks are already becoming integrated into the day-to-day work of the classes.
This photo, taken towards the end of the day in P5B, shows how the netbooks are becoming just another tool on the students’ desks. Not only have the students not had to take a trip along to a dedicated computer suite, there’s none of the sense of computers taking centre stage which can happen when the class is having a turn to use a trolley of much larger laptops. These netbooks were being used today in a way that reminded me more of the way people typically use calculators, just pushing them to the side when not required.
This maybe an unexpected advantage in terms of embedding the use of ICT into classroom practice; the small size of netbooks allows them to be easily used on small classroom desks alongside jotters and other stationery.
I also heard from Mr McEwan today that battery life is not proving to be as much of a problem as we had though it might be. The netbooks started going home with the students at the weekend, where parents had agreed, and the students are now charging them ready for their day at school. 
In general, the battery charge is lasting long enough for a day’s school use. The ones I saw in use today had their display brightness set quite high, suggesting that more life could be achieved if needed by encouraging dimming of the displays.
The students are now carrying the small chargers in their bags, and topping up the battery if needed during the day using power sockets around the classroom. This doesn’t seem to causing any problems and suggests there may be no need to purchase additional chargers for the classroom. It’s looking like the most useful thing we could do at the moment is provide a couple of long “power strips” to enable charging of multiple netbooks in a single place in the classroom.
We also had our first casualty today, with one Eee PC where the on-off button appeared to have been pushed in too far, and had become loose. Advice from IT was that a failure like this is never covered by equipment warranty. A makeshift repair proved possible, and the machine will be returned to service.
Venturing into new infrastructure territory was never going to be without its risks, and so it has proved: we’ve learned that Glow Mail won’t currently work with Version 3 of the Firefox browser that’s installed on the netbooks.
This turns out to be a known issue, which, to be fair, won’t be an issue for most schools. Up till now, this would probably only affect staff and student Glow Mail users who choose to use the Firefox 3 browser at home. The problem appears to be at the server end, so should be able to be resolved centrally.
Firefox 2 would work fine, but to change the software installed on the netbooks would go against one of the principles of the model we’re testing, which is to take advantage of the “reset to factory build” capability in the event of software problems. Teachers are being trained in how to do that, by hitting F9 during startup, and have already found that useful in one case. The agreement we have with our IT department colleagues is that they will help with purchase and asset tagging, and granting the necessary access to the school wireless networks, but are not able to provide hardware or software support for netbooks. This is reasonable: the devices are not “locked down”, so the potential for software support issues is relatively high, especially in secondary schools, and providing a support service could be costly.
This Quick Use Guide, available in various languages from the Asus web site, includes some well designed, step by step guides which look like they’ll be helpful once the Eee PCs go home with the children.
Eee PC 4G Quick Start Guide (pdf, 14 pages, 1MB)
Children are still using responsibly. Seem to have sorted the one that would not work yesterday. Took the battery out and restarted restoring to factory settings with F9 and seems to have done the trick.
Been a couple of comments on site from parents about the cost of this, big class sizes etc but those have been replied to and explained at School Council meeting.
At end of Maths today got two children to write a few sentences about work done and took a few pictures. Blog and pictures done in minutes! Easy!
Check out post and blog below