Continuing a line of though that started last week... there continues to be some chatter around Vermont anyways about the potential and limitations of running a school on the cloud.
I am adding my own experiences... as I have been teaching primarily on the cloud for several years now.
My students use local profiles to log on to Ubuntu and Macintosh computers (in some of my classes, there are not sufficient numbers of identical machines for my students-- rather than complaining about the obviously poor planning of our school and technology leaders, I kluge together enough machines and go to work. Those accounts are local administrators, so students can install updates and any software we require as needed.
Most of our work is then done on the cloud-- productivity suites, etc. Usually my students move to the Macintoshes for multimedia production projects.
All projects are handed in, via a Moodle classroom.
I gotta say, that my system (and the model that was presented last week) works-- and I find that it is dirt cheap. Once I get a machine in front of a student-- which costs only a few hundred bucks if we buy a PC without an operating system and install Ubuntu, then the machine costs nothing.
About twice each year, I have students create a zip file containing everything that is stored locally (using zip files uploaded to the cloud-- a good lesson!) and then a single computer has the most updated version of Ubuntu installed (and configured to our network printers, etc.) and an image is made of that hard drive. (The imaging is also done using free software-- g4u is my favorite.
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