Roger <arelem@bigpond.com> wrote:
Students have to have wads of money to install all the apps on top of every other school cost. There will never be a final list of apps and that's it, it will be ongoing, as will the purchase of the next ipad, through the 6-10 years of school.
From what I understand so far, there may be 20 -30 apps as a minimum needed per student, or the school has to provide the apps which for say 3000 students works out at $6000 minimum per app. One school of that size has baulked at spending tens of thousands of dollars on apps and savvy students do not seem to like the ipad for school work.
The OLPC project solved the software delivery problem years ago. As I understand it, they use a central school server, which of course in many of their deployments can be expected to have little, if any, Internet access. They also use IP multicast to deliver system upgrades to many machines simultaneously within a school setting. Their next device is tablet-style, as I recall. Another solution would be remote mounting of file systems from a central server, for which again there is precedent in the Linux world. None of this solves the charging problem and I'm not sure how OLPC do so. There are various options, however, with solar being among the most effective if my memory of the most recent OLPC talk I attended is accurate.