My Vietnamese student using the Asus Eee PC

Back in September, American International School, where I teach ICT part-time, required students from the 9-11 Grades to purchase the Asus Eee PC 1000.  Due to strong resistance from students, parents, and faculty, this requirement was dropped.  Some students still opted to purchase the Eee PC themselves at the school discount.

One of the biggest complaints they had about the Eee PC was the GUI.  You could not do much with it.  It short, it was too boring.  Some were successful in getting the Full KDE Desktop environment to work but others decided to just install Windows XP Lite.

On Friday, I was so surprised to see one of my 8th Grade Students, Candy, using the simplified desktop with her Eee PC.  She was even using StarOffice, the propriety version of OpenOffice, with little difficulty.  Linux is difficult, eh?  Well, I doubt she really could tell the difference between Windows and Linux anyway :-)

I am considering asking my students in the 8th Grade to purchase the Eee PC, with both Windows and Linux, for the remaining school year.