Asus Eee PCs at Egglescliffe School

The initial decision to try the Asus EeePC came from the head of science in 2007-2008. We bought one to see what they were like. The science department has introduced a forensic science course with a significant amount of course work that needs to be created in class time.

The teacher wanted to be able to create and save coursework in class without the students having to travel to an IT room.

The Asus EeePC

This machine is described here. www.asus.com.

We decided to be fairly conservative and set the following parameters.

1. The internet settings should restart at the beginning of each session, so re-starting the machine threw away any custom settings that a previous user may have set.

2. We would not mount the student's home folder as a (smb) share. This is because accessing a home folder as a smb share (rather than over the network via some kind of http based service) is very demanding of the wireless network – much more so than just web browsing. A smb link which allows a double click access to a file will generate a great deal more traffic than merely downloading the file.

3. We would limit the applications runnable by the student.

4. We would block command line access to stop us having to remove the applications that we did not want students to access.

5. We would have the home page as the VLE and students would use a VLE assignment to store files. Teachers would set up the assignment they wanted students to use and set dates, file sizes, numbers of files etc. Groups are automatically set by password on our VLE and class concurrent uploads are fast because the server is in-house.

6. We would stick to the standard xandros apt repositories that the machines use from new.

7. We would generate a USB stick-based image for fixing any machines that became corrupt.

Classroom experience

Access to computers became a problem for us in science particularly after we started the new applied science course. Computing rooms were difficult to book and we needed a lot of capacity. Sometimes five groups wanted access to computing facilities at the same time. So on the principle that ‘If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed…. ‘ we purchased 24 Asus EeePCs to create the possibility of two ‘computer rooms’ within the science faculty.

Initially I was anxious about this because there are always problems with laptops even when you are using your own and so the prospect of a different pupils constantly using different laptops seemed fraught with difficulty. However the experience we have had so far has surpassed expectation. They work and they work quickly. The boot-up times are short and classes have been writing coursework onto the machines within less than 10 minutes of arriving at the lesson.

The pupils like them. They are not irritated, as the staff are, by the small size of the screen and the keyboard. They seem to consider them cute. I have been impressed by how quickly they have adapted to the software. Using computers with children has often been an exercise in how to solve computing hardware and software problems whereas the simplicity and robustness of these machines seems to result in lessons where they are just an effective tool to do a task. Using the internet has similarly been unexpectedly simple. A class of 18 students can all access the internet. The access to the router is rapid and allows the pupils to remain interested and focused.

Use of the machines across the faculty is, because of their small size and weight, straightforward. Although we are on three floors, we have no problem in transporting them to be used in any lab.

There are some difficulties in their use. The battery does not retain its charge for as long as we would like and so we invariably use them with the power supply. This is suitable for us because our labs have many sockets. I suspect that there might be problems in a different environment. It is also possible that if we could organise a mechanism for charging that was easily applied between lessons then this problem would disappear.

In addition saving files has not been straightforward. The idea was that we saved to the learning platform. This requires saving to a space on the computer first. This can cause problems because the environment is not the same as Windows and lower ability pupils are not familiar enough with it to make it an instinctive process. Student who are familiar with the platform can save work very quickly and the work is accessible to their teacher.

The laptops are still novel and this is part of their appeal. With time the novelty will wear off and we will find out whether the small keyboard and screen will be unattractive to students, but at the present time I am optimistic that their use will be very beneficial to the faculty.