Asus Eee PC

Over the past few months I have been intrigued by a little machine called the Asus Eee PC. At the Central Valley CUE Conference (CVCUE). I met Chris Edmonson from the Clovis School District. He had an Asus Eee PC with him. His district is currently using some of these devices in his distrit with students.

This device falls into a category known as ultraportable devices. It is similar to the OLPC or the Intel Classmate PC. While, the Asus did not receive as much press as these other machines, it is still a great option for schools interested in one-to-one computing. It is not a full laptop in the sense that we are used to. Instead it is more like an Internet appliance. What I mean by that is that you can do a lot of the things you would do with a regular laptop, except that instead of traditional software like Microsoft Office you use a lot of innovative open source and web 2.0 applications. These applications encourage collaborating with one another and producing media that can be published and shared on the web.

The interface is really easy to use. It has four tabs on its main screen: Internet, Work, Learn & Play. The Internet tab includes Skype, an e-book reader, a wireless utility, and site links to Wikipedia, Google Docs, and Internet Radio. Under the work tab it includes Open Office 2.0, built in Acobat Reader and Mozilla's Thunderbird web-client for email. The learn tab includes math and science applications primarily designed for high school. The play tab includes multimedia applications. While it doesn't have a lot of memory, users can upload to online storage places such as Flicker and UTube. The Asus has 4 Gig of Flash memory/ 512 MB of RAM. It is Linux based or Windows XP compatible. It has a built-in video camera, microphone and speakers. More specs are available at the Asus site.

The Asus costs about $200. Connie Jaeger, technology coordinator from the Mequon-Thiensville School District brings up a good point though. That is, if your district does not have a strong wireless infrastructure while the device is cheap you will be paying for it through infrastructure costs.