[Facedown98]

Hi guys, I'm fortunate to the the President of my school's Technology Club, and sadly, our school only has one computer class, which I took my Freshmen year (I'm currently a Junior). That's ridiculous to only have one course. The problem is, almost anything we go into requires system updates and such, and the Technology Dept. isn't looking so good... We would like to submit some grants for education, however, I'm not really sure where to look... I have gone to the following companies and have looked at their information. HP, Toshiba, IBM, Cisco. Now, I looked at Microsoft, but we don't meet those requirements for sure. Does anyone else know of somewhere I might be able to try? All help is appreciated. Thanks

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geeks to go ?

[Mr.Chow]

geeks to go ?

[warriorscot]

Geeks to go isnt a company like that, Blair doesnt pay us i dont think [bleep] have spare cash to build a computer lab at some school.

I dont know about the US but here the national lottery is a pound and only something like 50 or 60% goes to the game the rest goes to a charity fund for good causes, they buy alot of computers for youth orginisations and schools maybe you have something similar alot of countries do.

[sheba123]

Try Techsoup.org.

A lot of non profit and educational news, advice and software - it's the main clearinghouse for things like that.

Also - check with local businesses that may be tech heavy and see what they do with their unused tech stuff and see if you can build a relationship with them.


Hope it helps

[dsenette]

That's ridiculous to only have one course

i had one computer class too...half the year was "keyboarding" and the second half was programming in gwbasic...talk about a joke

i'm with sheba...hit up all the local companies that are even remotely tech related (heck even some that aren't tech related)...they can get some pretty heafty tax breaks for donations and what nots...it's alot harder to get funding from the national companies because they've got ALOT of hands out for their money/time...try to stick local...you'll get better results...you may not be able to get as much money at once...but with enough initiative...a $1000 from a few companies will add up

[Facedown98]

Thanks for the replies That's a good idea, I'll search local. As far as our courses though, we just have a half school year of computer apps, which is Microsoft Office. Now that's a joke lol Also, the lottery would help, only, this is a Catholic School... No funding from that Thanks guys

[warriorscot]

Well if you are missing applications you can find most things open source, if you switched the computers over to linux youll find that for things like coding youll find alot of free tools and compilers. I use linux for my coding at uni because its the only way i can get a decent compiler for free. Yould be surprised what you can get for free, also old hardware is sometimes doable old government systems recycled are good, recycled dells usually not overly powerful but enough and if you need more cpu power they can always be set up to share high load tasks. Its either that or get one or two large powerful systems like the sun workstations, then you can just connect into them remotely with SSH and an Xwindow client.

[mpfeif101]

Although it might sound nice, theres no way you're gonna get a school to switch over to Linux. All the teachers/administrators are so accustomed to Windows (or every now and then Mac). It's set up perfectly the way they want it (with logins, controlling the students, etc). Not to mention that the schools have better things to do (such as teach) then spend massive amount of time switching over to Linux which wont even benefit them that much in the long run.

Quality software can be got for free, but as for hardware... that would probably just cause more problems (remember, schools don't have tons of computer experts sitting around).

Just my two cents

[Facedown98]

I appreciate both comments. Linux is good, but only for a few "test computers". That would keep some of the cost down. Really, I'm not sure what to do about these grants, but we'll figure something out. Thanks

[warriorscot]

Well its becoming more common for linux adoption, in Australia they use linux now and most universities use it too. And small scale adoption is easy one or two classrooms is easy to set up and use, and if you are really nice and youre admin knows there stuff then you could probably convince them to try it, they deep down are geeks to.

[Facedown98]

lol how true We're actually a little worried, because our IT man is retiring after this year... No word on a replacement yet. These computers with Linux would be for test though. Not like they would be connected to the network or anything.