Given you can now buy a tablet with 1Gb ram for £28 a 64gb SD card for £7 and a ~7w solar panel for £8.50
Does it start to make sense to give/sell each teacher a tablet with Rachel on it?
It seems like it would get the teachers on-board, give them a chance to research the content which could then be shared via a projector in the classroom
Has anyone deployed like this?
Hi. We did a similar deployment here in Liberia. We used one Rachel+ device and 30 tablets. We left them with the school. It helps a lot and makes life easier 
The biggest problem we faced was the fact that we used only one Rachel+ device. Because of this, teachers couldn’t take the tablets home to practice. Theyv all needed to be on campus and together to get connected to the server.
What tablets are you getting so inexpensively? We purchased 90 tablets for around $40 US each, however, the quality was lacking. They were shipped to our project in Guatemala directly from the factory in China - and several were flaky from the outset. Other projects in Guatemala are using tablets that are closer to $100 each.
Hi the link is above, just an illustration really as you’re probably right that the absolute cheapest is probably false economy. This looks OK for $70 with a $10 case
In terms of the inability to take them home, I was imagining that each tablet would have it’s own SD with Rachel content locally.
Is there any decent opensource powerpoint-like software for Android? I had a quick look but couldn’t spot a slide maker.
There would still be a role for server architecture, but I guess it might make sense to explore something like https://nextcloud.com/ for that so lesson plans teachers have developed could be shared and backed up.
My group thought about using tablets on our initial deployment. We had a difficult time finding decent tablets and a reasonable cost in addition to keeping them charged and maintaining the batteries over a long term use.
We opted to go with the Raspberry PI 3b+ for the desktops and server and provide a fixed class that the students can rotate through as well as the teachers whenever they needed to plan lessons or gather information from the RACHEL resources.
We were lucky that a local company donated older square style Dell 19" monitors and with some mice and keyboards donated as well. The average cost per desktop is $45.
Pi’s for desktop makes sense.
Did you use any projectors in this configuration? How long has it been successfully running?
We do not have any projectors up yet. That is one thing we are looking into for future. We would like to use a cart with a desktop setup and the projector that can be moved class to class when needed as these classrooms are not secure.
I installed the computer room in January 2019 with 14 desktops, 1 RACHEL server and 1 file server. It ran till the end of school in May. The class has been in sporadic use this fall due to the unrest that has caused the schools to stay closed. However, we use the classroom for our kids club sometimes on Saturdays and 1 off days when possible until school resumes. So far we have not had any issues reported or that I saw when I was there in August.
I have about 12 spare microsd’s already flashed and waiting and 1 to 2 USB duplicator to re-flash any corrupted card in about 8 minutes. The class was re-worked this August to add an additional 6 desktops.
Great stuff, sounds like a positive project.
Hi Sam,
PowerPoint on Android is available from the Google Play Store. We download Word, Excel, PowerPoint, a flash player, a PDF reader, & VLC on every tablet before we deploy them. I think this is a great idea, preloading RACHEL on a tablet, but I don’t think it will work (however, I never tried it). RACHEL runs on Windows, but I don’t think it will run on Android. Jeremy???
LarryY
I don’t think a few of the key components run on Android (KA-Lite? Kolibri? MySQL? PHP? Kiwix?). If they do, you’ll need a more than average Android tablet (4GB of RAM ideally and lots of storage). It won’t have the unified page most likely.
Sorry I should have been clearer, I meant the USB version, you wouldn’t get advanced features, but some good content nevertheless.
Sure that probably works well, those apps are not open source though, so it’s not possible to distribute them legally. (apart from VLC and possibly the PDF reader)
“You may install and use one copy of the software on Android devices you own or control in order to view existing documents. As allowed by the software, which may require sign-in with a Microsoft account, you may also create, edit or save documents for non-commercial purposes.”