[seul-edu] I'll put in my two cents... and ask for a penny...

[Ryan Booz <ryanbooz@alumni.psu.edu>]

Hey folks,

I've been on this list for about three months, shamelessly reaping where
I have not sowed.  But after all this discussion over the last week,
I thought I would tell you where I'm at and ask for some suggestions
about decisions I have to make for the coming year.

I teach at a small private school in central PA.  Approx. 320 kids,
K-12.  Over the last two years we have taken the school from small lab
of 20 computers (486s up to PII) and a few in classrooms, to a lab of 23
computers (all pentium class or above) a computer in every room (all of
these run Windoze), and a server based (Samba) network.

I began fooling with linux at the end of '99 school year on
recommendation from a friend.  Dove into Samba and successfully served
about 35 computers with 170 users all year with only two instances that
the server went down (turn out to be a bad HD which has been replaced).
Also had a print server running Samba and acting as a firewall and DNS
server.  I was pretty happy with everything, and the now dead
(apparently as Ray even eluded to) K12Linux email list was my life line!

So this summer I was hired to just do their computers (was doing Music
also - which is where my certification is).  I am in the midst of doing
a few things and planning some classes that I would like to get some
opinions on.

First, I'm setting up a Apache server for Intranet use.  Not only will I
have some shares set up for student use on this machine (via Samba of
course), but have been asked by the school to set up some things for
administration use.  The biggest of which is writing an interface to a
database for out cafeteria so that as students go through the line, the
lunch lady could have a page called up on the screen that allows her to
find the student (via number I'm thinking), add items to his/her "bill"
and have it stored in a database.  So, I'm doing all my studying and was
thinking of going the old Apache, MySQL, Perl route for creating this
interface via the browser.  Then I saw the post this week about Zope and
it looks very interesting.  What are everyone's thoughts on the
direction I should go?

Second is the ever burning question of - what language to I teach?  I
have some C background as well as the old languages from my high school
and early college days (Fortarn, Pascal, Basic).  I am learning more
Perl as each day passes and finally writing some scripts to make my life
easier at school.  In the end I was leaning toward Java (which I still
have to learn this summer) or Python (same deal).  Where does everyone
stand?  remember, I'll be teaching it to them on  Windows machines.
Free is good!

Finally, I've seen very little discussion on curriculum in this group.
I don't know how many of us have to teach and how many just administer,
but I'm always looking for new ideas of things to teach and directions
to take my classes.  Any thoughts?

Thanks for keeping this going.  I know we all benefit from the list!
And Doug, even if you're not from Penn State, I'm still glad you're
doing a great job from some part of PA :)!

Ryan Booz
Tech Coordinator
Belleville Mennonite School