My wife is a 7th/8th grade math teacher and I hear all sorts of funny stuff related to technology (or lack thereof) in her district. I’ve been in IT for almost 13 years, so it’s interesting to hear the mix of using IT in education.

I really laughed when you guys were talking about using texting in term papers because my wife was recently grading some math tests and a number of the students wrote “IDK” for answers. She also noticed that there was other ‘text speak’ in different locations on these papers, with the assumption that these are shorthand notes to friends…

On the topic of use of technology in schools, I think that any organization, public or private sector, has the ability to employ and utilize technology to it’s fullest extent. What has to happen in order to make it most useful is that it has to be embraced from the top level management/administrators and work it’s way down. I have been in the public sector for over a decade and have seen great use of technology, but unfortunately, I have also seen the opposite. In those cases, it seems to me that the upper echelons of management are simply too “old school” (pun intended) to see the usefulness of using tech as a tool to make processes more efficient. In the instances where management embraces technology, I have seen the most stubborn users ‘get it’ and understand the benefits to the process change. I have to assume that in part it’s becuase they have to, but there seems to be some genuine understanding.

Again, thanks for the great show. It has certainly become a regular part of my commute (as well as a couple of my co-workers).

Thats the chant from IT workers with respect to moving to Vista.

Little background. Im the Desktop manager for a small private college where we have close to 700 desktop and laptops that we manage. We have no plans to move to Vista until at a minimum of 2010. Why? Well our PC inventory stretches purchases over 5 years so moving to Vista this summer would require us upgrading 3/5th of our computer inventory just to run Vista with some level of speed. Each year we don’t install Vista is 140 less systems we have to upgrade to support it. By 2010 we will have all our systems at a level that will run Vista at a level better than minimum spec.

As far as being forced to upgrade this summer due to XP no longer shipping from OEM’s. I say what! Why would that force anyone to move? Vista Business and Vista Ultmate have built in downgrade rights. This is how Dell and other companies are gong to still sell XP beyond June 30th. Just purchase your system with Vista Business Downgrade Rights to XP and presto you get XP preloaded and a Vista OEM license to install Vista when you want. But with this being an education centered podcast I can only guess that you all know about and hopefully use the K-12 equivalent of the Campus Agreement (I think they call it School Agreement for you all in K-12.) This permits you to run any version of the Windows OS as long as you have purchased some flavor of Windows with your system. So if you do get it shipped with Vista Business or Ultimate (the campus agreement lets you run any release of Vista) then just install XP and your legal. Dont want to reimage all your systems right out of the box? Well then use Dell’s custom factory integration to have a custom image put on it at the factory. We’ve been doing this for years and it saves our techs a lot of time since they take the system out of the box, turn it on and join it to the domain. All our software is preloaded and our settings are preset.

Last comment. I’ve been using the new Ubuntu for several weeks now when it was an RC and I find it better than the Debain install I had on my D600 prior to that. The darn Broadcom wifi drivers do seem to be a bit problematic but once I fixed that its running nice. I put 2gig of ram in it and run XP visualized on it as well when I need to hit our campus network.

Cant wait to hear the next show. Sad that summers comming and we have to wait weeks to hear your banter.