SmartArt

I've come to this thread late but after reading that comment I think I had better put that posting straight: This won't sort out weak ICT teachers from the good ones because what's being tested in this abomination is skills based! The National Curriculum - you know, what teachers have to teach, and no arguing because it's "da lore" - is cognitive based - thinking skils based not actual doing skills based; so ALL ICT teachers are going to be in the dodo, even ex-teks like me. Sorry if that's bent your preconception out of joint.

Errr, we did have (the UK) compuetrs in 1943; and the world did become a very different place because of them. One thing I would have changed though back then, if I was Winston Churchill, no, make that two things: I wouldn't have given the Americans one; and, two, I wouldn't have them all destroyed at the end of WWII. Politicians, shesh!

Using a !Live cd is a good way to test out the machines, as posted earlier BUT it all depends on how much RAM you have. If it's around 128MB-ish, then I would look around for SuSE 8.2, or another distro that uses the earlier 2.4 kernels. Novell gave away a complete set of SuSE versions, including SuSE 9.0 Server, with SuSE 8.2 for desktops on a set of DVDs last year. It might be worth your while dropping them an email to see if they have any left. Failing that, google for an ftp site, mirror.ac.uk (or summat like that) and then search through for the iso's for SuSE 8.2. SuSE 8.2 is a damn good release and it will run quite well on a celery 400 PC, I can't reccomend 8.2 enough, it was the bee's knees. However, it all depends on how much RAM you've got; that's the key, a reasonable amount of RAM.

What a FW of a question! Perhaps teachers should have a webcam installed in the "seat" of their pants so that when they're bent over a kid's desk, with their back to some of the class, you know, teaching, then they could literally keep their "red" eye on the rest of the wee ones. Shesh! Kids do it because that's what some kids do. I don't like it any more than any one else in this group. And you try and get the head to ring the police over a missing mouse. And guess what, even if he does, what do you think the copper is going to say to the prospect of filling in 8 hours work of forms for £2.00. And one for you all to remember: if a machine is diffy a bit of kit like a mouse and you don't replace it, then you punishing all the other kids that cannot use that PC, as well as stopping the non-offenders from actually learning - spare me the comments about learning a real life lesson - and schools exist for only one purpose: to provide kids with an education; that's it! Thankfully, the teks at my school are wonderful; they're over-stretched, under-paid and I woudln't work for their boss, and thank goodness I don't, even on pain of separation from my pocket snooker set. Give me a break from the teacher bashing, puh-lease. You work in a shcool, or claim to, so you *should* know what it can be like. Right, back to being a miserable sod.

KDE is my usual flavour because I run SuSE. Gnome, however, is the prettiest GUI I've ever come across but it gobbles memory; alas! If you want a thin resource-friendly GUI-feel then try Blackbox. very quick and thin on rsources and you'll love the tear away menus! Be warned though, it can become very addictive just playing with the look-n-feel of Blackbox. You'll spend hours getting it just right for you. Oh, and get used to using all "3" mouse buttons, each has a very diiferent job in Blackbox; but, hey, you can easily chane the config of the buttons too. Enjoy!

The Cisco Aironet cards work fine. I've had sterling service from both the 340 and 350 cards. My Linksys card is recognised but doen't work correctly, I've had problesm trying to get it working using ndiswrapper as well. The 350 runs at g speeds, 54kbps. AFAIK different distros have different success rates with different cards. But I've never had any problems with 340 or 350 cards in any distro.

Restricting access to usb pens has pros and cons. I can understand the necessary paranoia about having a device that's capable of holding a complete O/S and goodness knows what else as boot & root kit. I would think having a machine or three per room that were open to all could be very beneficial, particualry with the annoying habit of even simple files growing to amazing sizes, that would have been considered grossly inflated even two or thee years ago. Kids with the new DIDa family of qualifications are going to need USB pens/portable hdds to be able to take their coursework to and from home. It's inescapable. I would rather have am ironclad sheepdip where kids had to have their devices scanned before before being allowed onto a pukka networked PC. Would there not be a way to link an encrypted token, valid for that period/day, onto a freshly scanned device. It wouldn't have top be a very big file, only big enough to hold something like Blowfish/MD5 key? I don't know about Windows but with a Linux box you could do this and restrict path of files taken from the USB device to a holding area if there was any doubt. Any other thoughts or ideas or tweaks to this idea? Because, remember, at the end of the day, those of us who work in schools, teahers, admin, support, whoever we are have to constantly ask ourselves this question: is what we are doing/going to do benefit the kids' educations. And being to allow kids to port large files vis a US pen to my mind will. And it's a lot betterthan having the "cherubs" being to send stuff (big stuff, little stuff, contraband stuff via email. I sit back and awit the scorch marks to appear on my screen. :-)

Take at look at this beauty before you throw the baby out with the bath water. It's Lenovo kit but as the T43 has had good reviews from other TP-ers... Perhaps the price might scare them off, especially as you'd need to include one at least one docking station. http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/IBM_ThinkPad_X41_Tablet_Laptops/prod.asp