A few weeks ago I asked on twitter if anyone would have any old laptops or netbooks which they would like to donate to our school. I got a few very generous offers of machines which I hope to collect shortly. That said we still need more, so if you have some old tech lying around, gathering dust and bothering the wife, why not give it to us?
You're probably asking why you should give something to a school for free, school have lots of money! Not exactly, our school is a registered charity and receives no money from the government; every penny comes from fees, gifts and fund raising, so you really would be helping us out.
We're going to load up the machines with Ubuntu Netbook Remix so all pupils have a consistent and familiar platform to work on, now that we're running Ubuntu on all the school computers. We'll try and upgrade the RAM as much as possible in all the machines tom make them a little more useable and then just hand them out to Year 11 and 12 (GCSE) pupils to use in whatever way they wish. As well as the standard web and office apps, Ubuntu is packed with creative apps too and it'll be nice to see what they can produce and how they will fit a laptop into school life. Come September we hope to have all the laptops we need, it's a small school so we actually only need 10 computers to cover both year groups. There are only 23 pupils in the whole high school!
If you'd like to donate a spare laptop, just leave a comment below, the form will take your email address, but not publish it. Alternatively if you have any questions or tips on 1:1 computing I'd love to hear from you.
