Just finished listening to the podcast and playing with Celestia while listening. Both cool!

I am a Director of Technology Planning in a 20,000 student district in Washington and we are experiencing the same issues. In my position I advocate for teachers, principals and students; there is a separate Director of Technology responsible for the network, information systems and desktop support. He is retired miltary and has a logistics background…I was a elementary principal for 15 years and taught 3rd 4th and 5th grade.

He’s a George and I’m a Bud.

Bandwidth is an issue but teachers aren’t restricted from downloading Firefox, Celestia or Google Earth onto their Laptop. All 1200 teachers have their own laptop and the statement they hear is that they will receive the best performance from their HP NX7010 if they do not download any programs. But there is nothing that would prevent them from downloading or adding anything. If they have a malfunction the laptop is collected and they are given another laptop with the identical image as on day one. Their old laptop is reimaged and reissued to the next teacher with an issue. The CTE department is impressed with their first look at Deep Freeze for student computers and the tech department is excited to add it to as many computers as possible.

Another issue is website restrictions, currently we use BESS from N2H2 and Secure Computing; I find it to be pretty open. Wikipedia, Blogger, Flickr, WikiSpaces and many other wikis, blogs and social web sites considered “Loopholes” are not currently blocked. But I can feel the MySpace paranoia coming with George in the lead. Recently George was clicking on the “Next Blog” button on my Blogger site and said he had pornography on his computer within 3 clicks. The Director of Communications, another George type personality said she was “shocked and amazed” when she clicked on the “Next Blog” button on my blog and was able to see pornography. I have tried to replicate the experience and I have clicked that “Next Blog” button for almost 30 minutes and never saw anything that I would consider pornographic…

We share many of the same issues and yet I have no solutions to offer.

PS. Well deserved Washington Post mention.

Hi Bud,

I’m a Director of Technology for a private K-12 school in New York City. We have 620 students, about 325 machines.. We currently have dual T-1′s but are looking to get a 10MBps connection (that can be scaled to 100Mbps or 1GBps). The Dual T’s are $700/month. The 10Mbps connection is under $2000 per month. We keep using more bandwidth and I can’t imagine when the thirst is going to stop.

We do lock down machines, but it’s very easy to add software in our environment. I also give faculty admin access to their laptops or desktops. Your comments about locking down computers seems a lot like we’ve locked down education with NCLB. If you don’t trust the user (or learner or teacher) then you don’t let them do anything outside of the standards.

I’ve always taught in a private school (but went to public schools growing up) and the blogosphere has brought me views that are very scary as I have a 5, 2, and 4 month old at home and we are beginning the process of public schools. Thanks for giving me faith that we’ll find teachers like you who care and are modeling exploratory teaching for their students.

- Alex

Bud,

Great podcast, glad you’re back. Thanks for making the clarification between experimenting ON students and experimenting WITH students. A great clarification that I think needed to be made.