Oh yeah, you got that right! Theoretically, Deepfreeze lets you schedule a maintenance time, so the machine automatically reboots in a thawed state and downloads updates- but it never works in practice!

I am in almost the same position as this tech coordinator (we have 520 students). We have only had a couple (less than 5, for sure) students who have attempted to circumvent the System. We've had one who figured out that Firefox stores all your passwords in plaintext, and managed to borrow a clueless teacher's laptop long enough to copy the entire list of her login, network, banking, and email passwords (um, hello, now you know why we tell you all the time to LOCK THE SCREEN!). But no, the students AREN'T falling over themselves trying to hack the network or get unrestricted web access. The only time they get creative is if we block apps like iTunes, since that pisses them off.

Besides, our laptop program isn't a tech-training program. We're treating the laptops like tools, like textbooks. Sure, you need to know how to use that tool, but that's not the focus in the classrooms. We leave that for the tech-ed teachers.

Our student sign an AUP when they register each year. It's also signed by their parent or guardian. And it's not a legal document, perhaps- but we're not going to charge them with a crime if they violate it; we'll merely take their laptop away for an appropriate amount of time, or impose some other consequence for their actions. Our AUP also says you won't use our network to send porn or spam or conduct business (could be construed to prohibit eBay), yet we only really come down on people who send spam. And they're usually our bosses...*grin*

This post is specifically about Grade 6 to Grade 12 students.

You have a point- there are a lot better ways the money could be spent. That being said, there are sound pedagogical reasons for using the Macs, particularly with regard to literacy and numeracy. HOWEVER, if our friends at Sun ever get Open Office up to MS Office's specs, a LOT of people will migrate to OSS. The only reason we haven't is that MS Word has features that are used every day by our teachers, that OO lacks. Once those show up, we'll be the first to go to Linux!

The other things Macs have going for them are sturdier hardware and a great (better than Windows) OS. We have never had one come in with a virus or malware; and they can literally take a hell of a beating.

I tell you though- Apple is killing their education (K-12) market in a hurry by pulling stunts like dropping the 12" subnotebooks and killing firewire. When the MSI Wind is available in a 12" format, maybe we'll seriously look into going Hackintosh!

Deepfreeze actually works quite well- it allows you to set a 'thaw' partition that allows users to store files on the local machine, but keeps the c: drive locked down.

That being said, I would never in my wildest dreams think of releasing Windows laptops into the wild of a student body, if I were expected to keep them running. A lab is one thing, but mobile machines? Egad. Especially if they were allowed to take them home and connect them to the wide open cesspit of the unfiltered malwareverse!

I would suspect so, if it's on YOUR network. Especially since courts have established that users are responsible for traffic on their networks, and that connecting to an open wifi network is stealing.

Speaking of Latin, our sig files are eerily similar!

Yeah, thanks for that, buddy! Good thing the government is paying our bandwidth bill...

I think there's a disconnect between what governments want and what is actually required. Too many people are scared of the Big Bad Internet and all those legions of pedophiles and cyberbullies and l33t h4x0rs just waiting to corrupt The Poor Defencless Children. They take the position of "If we protect our children from it, they won't be hurt by it", and "If they can't access it, it won't corrupt them"; which is ironically the exact opposite tact taken with regard to that other topic, Sex Ed. If you tried to tell educators that they should be simply banning sex among children, or that they should segregate schools by sex, you'd be laughed out of town. Yet when it comes to something like the Internet, they attempt to do exactly that.

In our District (SD92 Nisga'a), we apply an absolute minimum amount of filtering. Don't get me wrong- our connection is content-filtered at the gateway in Victoria where our main connection point is- that's because the Province provides all schools with broadband connections, and they use a single gateway for all of us. It's filtered by Websense, which is a pretty stupid company overall, but fortunately, we have our own set of rules, so we're not tied to what everyone else gets. If a site is blocked that we feel is legitimate, we can (and have done) request a removal, and it takes a day or two to kick in.

At a District level, we do zero content filtering. We will occasionally block a website temporarily at the request of an administrator, but at most for a couple days (if, for example, there's a case of bullying that needs to be dealt with). We do watch our squid logs for 'interesting' surfing habits, but in several years, that's only resulted in a couple of reprimands for students.

As for other restrictions, we use Apple's Workgroup manager to help with that, although I have to say, it's probably not the best thing out there. It tends to cause us headaches with mobile users. We restrict what students can install through Workgroup Manager (they get a local account on the machine, but it's very restricted), and teachers can authenticate to allow apps to be installed if needed. We had to kill Bonjour on our networks because there was too much filesharing and chatting going on during classtime- which really comes down to a classroom management issue, not a technical one, but it's easier for teachers to ask for services to be nuked than to change how they run their classrooms. (That being said, most of our teachers are awesome and really do grok the importance of open networks.)

Our students get to take their lappys home at night, and because we use an authenticating proxy for web in our schools, they need to disable their proxies outside the district. Since they can't (limited account), we provide them with Firefox on their machines, and set it for direct connection. That way, Safari uses their Network Prefs proxy, and Firefox lets them straight out. For teachers and admins, we set them up with Locations.

As for customising the laptops, we pretty much let them at it. We spend a lot of time in the summers removing stickers and Sharpie doodles, but allowing the students to personalise their machines actually has given them a higher level of ownership, which results in less willful damage to the machines.

As to the discussions around selling the units when they hit a certain age, we've decided not to go that way. For student machines, because they are almost all using G4 iBooks, we're keeping as many as we can and using them for spare parts as the warranties expire. And honestly, after four years in a high-schooler's hands, those things aren't worth much! The Elementary students are a lot easier on their machines, so those ones last longer. We talked about selling them at, say 4 years, but decided it would be better to keep them for spare parts. While you will only get $200 for a 4-year old 12" iBook, if the screen is good it's worth $600, and the logic board is worth $700 (GSX replacement cost). So that crappy-looking, scratched-up brick is suddenly worth more than we paid for it as spare parts alone.

As for live screen monitoring, we have Apple Remote Desktop for that. Our teachers can use it for helping students or just checking quietly to make sure they are working, but not many do. As techs, we really only use it for troubleshooting- like we have time to babysit! If a laptop is reported stolen, we will check our logs to see if it's online, then we'll try and get an ARD session going to get more data. But Workgroup Manager tells us who's logged into the machine and all that stuff anyhow.

I can go into a lot more detail if there's interest, but I gotta go watch Big Bang Theory now. Obviously the Slashdot traffic wasn't enough to kill my bittorrent session!

We use Apple's Workgroup Manager in our district to control user rights on our ibooks and Macbooks. It's "ok", but not "great". Works well for restrictions, but not so well for un-restrictions. For remote monitoring, our teachers have Apple Remote Desktop- similar to VNC, but more feature-rich (and expensive!). For monitoring users' web activities (all we really are told to care about), we have our Squid logs. Students who take their lappys home obviously have to either a) change their proxy settings (which they need admin rights to do, so that's out); or b) run an alternative browser (we set up Firefox with no proxies for this purpose, and they use Safari in-school).

Don't be an idiot.