One Netbook Per Child

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:

• Some children are not bringing them into school charged so have to run and plug them in when you go to use them
• A couple have had problems connecting to the net
• The power button on one had had problems since the start and broke.

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.

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.

Tonight I was invited to attend the Parent Council meeting after concerns had been raised about the project in the light of current finance constraints. Time was limited, but the meeting was well attended and the members showed a strong interest.

The topics covered included such things as costs and benefits, home use, damage risks, future plans and home internet access.  I explained how access to the net, and online resources, was becoming more important than access to computers, and how that had led to Scotland’s Glow project and our increasing interest in providing net access as conveniently and cheaply as possible.

It was interesting to hear a couple of early observations from HT Mr McGillivray:

• noticeably improved “time on task” during a poetry writing lesson
• a strong sense of ownership of the devices, and very careful handling

I have agreed to attend the next meeting and demonstrate Glow to the Parent Council. I am sure any interested parents would be welcome to attend.