One Netbook Per Child

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.