Eee and Me

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 07:06:14 -0500

I love my MacBook Pro laptop! However, I teach in an all-Windows school and I’m hoping for a 1:1 program in the near future, hopefully before we move in the twenty-second century! one-to-one computing in my classroom will not include MacBooks, sadly (I’m jealous, Brian Crosby!), so I’ll have to settle for using my Mac personally. I use my Mac all day long as a teaching tool. If all of my fifth graders had their own laptops at school, our classroom would be transformed. So, when my class generously shared a CASH gift for my December birthday, I took the plunge and bought a Windows netbook. I’ve wanted to test-drive one of these 10-inch laptops for some time now, and this was the perfect opportunity to do this while giving back to my students. I tote my shiny new netbook to school every day, right alongside my MacBook Pro in my backpack, and my students use it as one of our 4 student computers with Internet access. We’re pretty good at sharing, but we’d rather all have our own!

I started my netbook search on Amazon.com; this is where I do most of my online shopping. The customer community there is very helpful, with reviews from real users of the products I’m interested in. The Asus Eee PC came up high on the list of recommended options. I eventually settled on the Eee PC 1005 HA because of its configuration:

• 10.5 hour battery life
• 250 Gb hard drive in two partitions
• 1 Gb RAM installed (I purchased a 2 Gb replacement)
• 1.66 GHz Intel Atom N280 Processor (others use the N270)
• Windows 7 Starter

You can read all the specs and see what others have to say about it on Amazon. Or, just google it. What follows is my impressions and real-world experiences after using this little netbook for about 3 weeks, including a 3-day intensive workout at FETC in Orlando where I’m writing this blog post. I hope this endorsement helps someone who’s considering either a personal purchase or a school installation. I really love this netbook!

My favorites are the battery life, the small footprint (size/weight), and the fact that I’ve installed free and/or open source software and can do almost everything I can do on my MacBook Pro, although with some tradeoffs in speed and convenience. Did I mention I love my MacBook Pro?

Take the battery life, for example. It really DOES last for 10.5 hours as they claim. I can take it off the charger in the morning around 5:00, check a few things on it, close and pop it in my backpack at 6:00, open it at 7:30 at school, and keep it going until 3:30 when I reverse the process and head home. At home I’ve worked from 5:00-6:30 before having to plug it in for a battery charge. Add it up: about 60 minutes early in the morning, 8 hours at school, and another 90 minutes at home in the evening. That adds up to 10.5 hours! All of this was wireless, which eats batteries! My whole reason for getting this little gem was to give it a real-world workout as if I was a student in my classroom using a netbook. In fact, throughout the day students DID use my netbook because I wanted to see how they adapted to its smaller form factor, keyboard, screen, and how they took to “something new” right out of the box. They loved it, and I loved the fact that I didn’t even need a charger at school. It went all day including before and after school “homework”. That’s the biggest benefit!

My first day walking around the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando I lugged around my backpack with way too many wires and electronic devices, including this little netbook. On day two I dumped everything out and just popped in the netbook, the FETC program guide, and a few miscellaneous necessities. After walking around all day with this thing I was still in shape to walk with some friends to a local Red Lobster for dinner. I love the smallness of this thing! I typed on it all day long using OpenOffice, taking notes from the sessions I attended. When a speaker mentioned a website, I went to it wirelessly using the built-in 802.11n. All-in-all, this netbook got easier to use as I used it. It took me a few days to get used to the 92% keyboard size, but now it’s just second nature. I like the feel of it, and I’m a pretty fast touch-typist. Sitting at one of those skinny, long tables next to other FETC attendees, my netbook took up hardly any space, so there was room for everyone else around me. I imagined a student working at their desk in the classroom: there would still be room for a book and a spiral notebook or piece of notebook paper! I love the size of this thing.

I mentioned OpenOffice. One of my experiments with this netbook is to see if I can use mostly free or open source software on it. I believe educators need to find affordable ways to implement technology in the classroom, and there’s no better price than “free” as long as the implementation isn’t costly in terms of time spent on learning and maintaining the technology tools (total cost of ownership). Already, I’m using Google Docs to share things with my students. I downloaded Audacity and am beginning to learn this tool for podcasting on the netbook. I’m an iLife user otherwise and, did I mention, I love my Mac for things like this. But, so far, the netbook is working out just fine for audio recording and editing with Audacity. I’m well into my experiment with a netbook running mostly free or open source software.

To complete that process I installed Linux — the Ubuntu Netbook Remix — with the help of Benoit St. Andre from Revolution Linux who was one of the presenters at FETC. So, my attendance at FETC paid off in several ways. I can now boot into Ubuntu Linux on my netbook using the second partition on my 250 Gb hard drive; or, I can open up in Windows 7. Both are new OSs for me. I’m learning all sorts of new things on this netbook. I still love my Mac, but with the long-lasting battery and small form factor, this netbook will be going with me on many more trips in the future.

So, for me this was more than simply the purchase of a netbook; I’m working on a total experiment to find out if 1:1 computing in my classroom is a reasonable possibility in the near future, given these lean economic times. We’ve been using Alphasmart Neos for the past several years. RenLearning has just announced a price drop to $150 for their Neo2. While I love the simplicity of the Neo, we could do so much more with full Internet access on a netbook running either Windows or Linux for about twice the price of a Neo2. In the months to come I’ll be comparing these two OSs side-by-side. I like the free/open source option (Ubuntu) for its price and, so far, its look-and-feel and ease of use has been encouraging. More to come on that as the weeks go by and I have a chance to give my experimental netbook a further test drive under both operating systems.

ISTE 09 Keynote

Mon, 3 Aug 2009 18:00:01 -0400

This is the ISTE 09 Keynote. Very inspiring and encouraging thoughts with a twist: Fleetwood Mac.

Original source: ISTE 09 website.

Teaching the Digital Generation

Mon, 3 Aug 2009 16:49:57 -0400

Someone sent this to me and said it was good. It is...and very thought-provoking. Should we teach differently when our students are growing up differently than we did?

The presenter’s website is another resource you may want to check out.

Original source: ISTE 2009.

Transforming Schools - from ISTE 2009

Mon, 3 Aug 2009 16:46:45 -0400

Someone sent this to me and said it was good. It is...and very thought-provoking. What should schools look like in the near future? If we were to start from scratch, would we create the schools we now have?

Original source: ISTE 2009.

Playing for Change | Peace Through Music

Mon, 18 May 2009 17:36:04 -0400

I found this website a while ago, and signed up for their email mailing list. Every once in a while I get a notice that they’ve recorded a new song. The producers travel the world and lay down new audio tracks as they go. Eventually, they have a song with singers and musicians from all over, mixed into the final product. Check out some of their other music at the playing for change website. Turn up the volume!

Paul’s View of Life at the SchwanPort

Eee and Me

ISTE 09 Keynote

Teaching the Digital Generation

Transforming Schools - from ISTE 2009

Playing for Change | Peace Through Music