wheres my server

A couple of months ago I was asked to come up with some ideas on how to get the new Digital Technologies strands into schools for year 13 students. I sat there and I thought, where can I start. I know what I am doing but is it in line with what others are doing. I looked back at what was done in 2009 and saw that one aspect of Digital Technologies Digital Media strand was to develop a web server. 

I sat and thought about how this could be done, schools could do what they have always done and just got students to create websites but not host them anywhere, or we could start looking at installing ubuntu on a virtual machine and habe that, run a usb livecd of ubuntu or try something way different. Use a hosted server, one that students can have access to and develop. 

One of these have already been developed in New Zealand and used, Catalyst do a high school summer programme which uses wheresmyserver for students to learn how to setup and maintain a server. Could we do something like that in new zealand.

Twitter is such a good place to develop these ideas, a wonderful comment started me thinking

I'm still amazed what uni's/polytechs are teaching wanabe web designers today, some still don't know anything about web hosting/ftp/sql...

If universities and polytechs are not teaching students these things, how are we expected to do this at High School. 

The new Level 3 Digital Media standards are an excellent place to start. With students being able to access there own fresh installed server and do the install of the LAMP stack, setup php and mysql as well as install and theme wordpress. These are some simple and basic issues of a install.

The students have been able to experience some of this already this year in my class. I have a machine at school that I use as a bit of a play machine. I have vmware running on it and have setup a couple of installs of windows xp and ubuntu, the students have been using a ubuntu install to develop mysql and php code to show the results of a BYOD survey we carried out at school. This has allowed them to show what they need for level 2 Digital information.

The issue is that they do not get to setup the sever themselves

Parts i still to work on, getting access to wheresmyserver through the school network, it is being blocked somewhere through a deny port access.

A resource to show others how to setup and install.

Meet with wheresmyserver to create an educational arrangement.