chrisk
Folding Captain
Hey folks;
I'm currently teaching a computer hardware class (I was working at the Board office supporting eLearning since 2019 but my leave from the classroom expired and now I'm back and working to get things set up again as the course hasen't been taught in a while.)
I have some good activities that I do that has students taking off-lease machines apart and we also network them. these are PCs that have integrated graphics and would be about 10 years old. Intel, of various flavours of i5 typically.
Until 2018, for this course I actually used some enterprise Windows XP disks. The reasons I used them was that the license key I used didn't require any activation and the underlying activity (having students use DHCP, create and join a peer-to-peer workgroup, and then manually assigning IPs as a next step) all worked great and the students learned enough that they could easily go home and configure their home Windows environment with skills learned in class.
I'm looking for somewhat more updated options that would work in my specific use-case scenario.
Anyone have any advice that can help me meet these requirements:
1. OS that is free to use in my scenario and can be installed via optical disk or USB while not connected to the internet
2. License keys (if required) would need to be somewhat easily transferred as students may have to transition to a different workstation or use different motherboards, etc as they damage and replace parts.
3. Can't connect to the internet. I could, perhaps, hot-spot these off my own phone if needed if an activation is required but these machines cannot be connected to the school network to download updates and such
4. I would prefer a Windows-based option. I've not used Linux in about 15 years and I don't know much about it, particularly the networking stuff. That said, I'd like to have Windows as our base OS, with an option for some students to dual boot into something like Ubuntu as an enrichment activity
I think that's most of my requirements. These classes/students are not especially techy so keeping things relatively simple with options for some harder stuff for students who need it is the best way to go.
Feel free to reply here or send me a DM if that's better for you. Many thanks.
I'm currently teaching a computer hardware class (I was working at the Board office supporting eLearning since 2019 but my leave from the classroom expired and now I'm back and working to get things set up again as the course hasen't been taught in a while.)
I have some good activities that I do that has students taking off-lease machines apart and we also network them. these are PCs that have integrated graphics and would be about 10 years old. Intel, of various flavours of i5 typically.
Until 2018, for this course I actually used some enterprise Windows XP disks. The reasons I used them was that the license key I used didn't require any activation and the underlying activity (having students use DHCP, create and join a peer-to-peer workgroup, and then manually assigning IPs as a next step) all worked great and the students learned enough that they could easily go home and configure their home Windows environment with skills learned in class.
I'm looking for somewhat more updated options that would work in my specific use-case scenario.
Anyone have any advice that can help me meet these requirements:
1. OS that is free to use in my scenario and can be installed via optical disk or USB while not connected to the internet
2. License keys (if required) would need to be somewhat easily transferred as students may have to transition to a different workstation or use different motherboards, etc as they damage and replace parts.
3. Can't connect to the internet. I could, perhaps, hot-spot these off my own phone if needed if an activation is required but these machines cannot be connected to the school network to download updates and such
4. I would prefer a Windows-based option. I've not used Linux in about 15 years and I don't know much about it, particularly the networking stuff. That said, I'd like to have Windows as our base OS, with an option for some students to dual boot into something like Ubuntu as an enrichment activity
I think that's most of my requirements. These classes/students are not especially techy so keeping things relatively simple with options for some harder stuff for students who need it is the best way to go.
Feel free to reply here or send me a DM if that's better for you. Many thanks.