Messages

1

General Discussion / Is Ubermix for me?

« on: May 05, 2014, 03:11:39 PM »

I'm looking for some advice, trying to figure out if Ubermix is the right solution for me.

My situation:  I teach the technology and media literacy classes at a pre-K to 6th grade school.  I work in a traditional computer lab, but the computers are laptops. Windows isn't really working for me. We use chromebooks elsewhere in the school, and I don't think that will be good enough either.

Below, I've got a list of what I see are the big challenges. I know that Ubermix addresses some of these problems out of the box.  My question is:  Can ubermix be adapted to meet all of these challenges, or is there an approach / distro out there that can?

Computers are shared
In my school, we have 480 students, ages 4-12.  They all have class with me for one period a week.  Each of the 26 computers in my lab are shared among about 19 students throughout the week.

Students need to be able to save their work, and be insulated from one another's work
Screwing up the saving process is the biggest problem I face.  Young children find it very difficult to navigate a "save" dialog.  Since they are sharing the computer with others, it is very common for work to be erased or overwritten by accident by another child. Ideally, each student would have their own user to insulate them from each others work, but we can't afford enough CAL's to do this on our windows domain. Also, I find that children younger than about 8 cannot be expected to manage usernames and passwords, even when they are very simple. I've gone down the flash drive route, and had a lot of problems there too.

Students need to be able to switch computers without losing work
One of the amazing things about Chrome is that students don't have to be married to a particular machine.  This is amazing when one of the computers is acting up, or a particular machine isn't available.  I'd like to replicate this freedom without the restrictions of Chrome.

We need real software
As an administrator I love chrome.  As a teacher I kinda hate it.  The offerings for creative web software are getting better, but still can't hold a candle to real computers.  I want my students to be able to edit video, write python scripts, etc.

It needs to be reliable
Running 26 computers at a time means that if there's a stability problem, you're going to find it.  If you do have to fix something, it should be fast and non-destructive. I really like Ubermix's, screw-it-just-reimage approach to computer maintenance for this reason.

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General Support / Re: unionfs overlay on flashdrive?

« on: June 04, 2013, 06:15:13 PM »

Thanks for the reply.  I'm glad to know it's possible, but I agree with you that it sounds dicy due to the unreliable nature of flash drives.  I'm going to continue searching for an elegant way to have multiple users per computer with Ubermix AND allow users to switch computers with minimum hassle.

I'll let you know if I figure anything out.

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General Support / unionfs overlay on flashdrive?

« on: June 03, 2013, 05:36:33 AM »

Okay, this is a wacky idea.

I know ubermix is designed for a 1:1 environment, but I teach several classes in a computer lab.  I would really like to find a way to allow each student to have their own instance of ubermix in my computer lab.

The problem, of course, is that the students are sharing computers, and I would like to maintain the ability to move students from computer to computer with minimum hassle.

Would it be possible (or even desirable) to install the base system on each computer's hard disk, but put the overlay on a USB thumb drive so that students can plug in the flash drive, boot up, and have their own Ubermix running with their docs / customizations?

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Q&A / Re: Ubermix on a flash drive?

« on: April 17, 2013, 01:42:20 PM »

Gotcha. You could use DejaDup for that sort of auto-backup. See http://www.howtogeek.com/108869/how-to-back-up-ubuntu-the-easy-way-with-dj-dup/ for a how-to.

Deja Dup looks pretty close to what I'm looking for.  I would still need to solve a few problems:

-Creating scripts for Ubermix so that backup is set up properly for the student
-Figuring out the best server to use for this type of backup
-Figuring out a scheme to keep each student's backup separate and organized

Any thoughts about tackling these problems?

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Q&A / Re: Ubermix on a flash drive?

« on: April 16, 2013, 03:29:13 PM »

It would probably be fine if the students used Dropbox, UbuntuOne or Google Drive for storage of their files

I'm not huge on using cloud backup for young students as they are rarely compliant with COPPA laws for use by the under 13 set.  I was imagining something a bit more homegrown like setting up a NAS on the school network and finding some type of simple backup to use with that, but that isn't my area of expertise.

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Q&A / Ubermix on a flash drive?

« on: April 15, 2013, 07:21:50 AM »

I just found out about Ubermix, and I'm pretty excited about it.  It seems to address a lot of the problems that keep computers from having a big impact on schools.

In my school, we are nowhere near a 1:1 environment.  However, I think that my students would benefit a lot from having their own persistent computing environment where they can save files and monkey with settings without worrying about sharing this space with other students.

For a long time, I've been eying the Sugar on a Stick project as a solution to this.  It puts the Sugar environment from the One Laptop Per Child project on a bootable USB the kid can carry with them from computer to computer.

My questions:

What would be involved with making Ubermix work this way? (doing an install of UM to a flash drive rather than an internal hard disk is easy enough but what other steps could we take to optimize this?)


USB sticks are pretty unreliable.   Is it it possible to set up a reliable, easy and quick backup / recovery scheme?   Ideally, this would be a system that kids and teachers could operate easily and quickly.

Thoughts>