Michael Stevenson's Colleagues

Michael Stevenson's Discussions

Started this discussion. Last reply by Brian Apr 24, 2009. 6 Replies 0 Likes

About Me: Music, English and IT teacher and Learning Technology Coordinator at Caroline Chisholm College. General all-round nerd.

At 6:09pm on April 18, 2009, Michael Stevenson said…: Thanks so much for all this information Anne. I think the more people blogging about this the better. It's also really good to hear about what you guys are up to in Vic, given your state government's decision to use the computer funds for netbooks.

Interestingly, Obama plans to do the same thing in American public schools with the X0-1.5 netbook from the One Laptop Per Child project. It's interesting to see something that was essentially planned as a low-cost, low-power machine for children in third-world countries is now making big headway into schools in the developed world. Three years ago this would have been unthinkable!

Cheers and thanks again,

M

At 5:15am on April 18, 2009, Anne Mirtschin said…: Hi Michael, I personally own an acer aspire netbook, which I really enjoy using. It works well on windows xp and I have not noticed it being slow at all. It does get really slow when I have two powerpoint presentations open at once.
However, the acer aspire netbooks for school have been great for what we need them for. My year 7s have to borrow some for an online elluminate class that we run with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Ajax. They work really well with that. Most students are on desktops in the computer lab but as I have 28 students, there are not enough computers for all of them and there have been no problems at all.
The grade 5 students are being subsidized by the Victorian Education dept and part paid for by school and part paid for by parents. These are lenovos and the kids only got them at the end of last term, so time will tell how well these go. But, the 15 netbooks in the library are constantly being borrowed either individually or as a class set, as it gives teachers a chance to use the internet and/or computers when the computer lab is booked or timetabled (which it is nearly all the time.)