Laptops for kids

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

network speed monitoring for school sysops under GILAS project

The Compostela NHS system showcases how to set up a network for a campus of 2000 high school kids. There are 207 high schools in the provincial division alone, and hopefull all of them will be connected to the Internet by the GILAS initiative. The quality of the connection is something that should be monitored, I recommend that GILAS organize all member schools to measure the quality of their network on a monthly or weekly basis. This could be done using the tools at Broadband Reports (http://www.dslreports.com/), they even have a mashup application of Google Maps, so decision makers can monitor the progress in each region.

used PC's for public schools

I visited Compostela National High School again, and they are in the process of setting up 80 PC's they acquired through a Peace Corps project, sourcing them through World Computer Exchange. They have some Pentium 1's that they have set up as terminals with LTSP, I saw 8 in the library working with two Pentium 4 servers. The performance using a browser and a spreadsheet was quite good, not noticeably slower that a typical new desktop, and they only had 64 k main memory. The shipment brought in another 250 units for the Cebu Provincial Schools Division, and there are another two containers with 800 units that are waiting to ship.