SSO solutions are easy enough; Shibboleth was overly-complex, having been designed for use in a closer-knit community with a far greater technical resource available and a greater technical skill in the average user. If SSO is needed use a multiple ID solution as do modern social services e.g. Disqus allows you to connect with a Google, Facebook or Twitter account or to register your own - it's about making it easy, not about making it hard. Authorise a couple of people in every school to confirm that person's status and expiry date and securely store that information somewhere once confirmed. Simples...

Secondly lack of SSO is not a real barrier to engagement; confidence in the use of the technology is a far higher barrier, coupled with the technologies in question and the degree to which people are interested in them. Plenty of people reguarly use secured applications with multple username/passwords used to access them; the difference is that they want to use them, that the applications in question are slick, focused and designed to engage. Fix that problem in the education space (as far as is possible) and the excuses regarding multiple usernames and passwords will sound far weaker than they did when first raised.

My own slides from this event are below:

Hi Rakesh,

I can recommend the openeducationdisc, a DVD of open source software.

you can download the .iso file to burn to DVD from;

http://sourceforge.net/projects/opendisc/files/openeducationdisc/10.10/OpenEducationDisc.10.10.iso/download

the latest version is from november of last year so some things may have dated in that time but most will be up to date.

you could also look at preinstalling usb sticks with portable apps from

http://portableapps.com/

but if costs are a problem, this is likely to be too expensive, but worth looking at to fund for next year perhaps.

wish you every success

David

Schoolforge UK was maintaining a page with school-bsaed case studies, not sure whether that is still being added to. Might be interesting to do something the other way around e.g. have a directory of products by function and under the product entry have testimonials from schools using that product.

E.g.

Software by category-Library Systems-Koha-School Testimonials-"Houghton Kepier says this is just great!"

 Thanks for the replies. I was aware of the packages that are out there. What I can't find is a school that is using them.

We use Opensource software extensively in our school. But, I can understand why our librarian wants to talk to another school to see how they are managing with using the software.

PS

Joined the Koha mailing list and was  pointed to this site for seraching for what I needed :)

http://www.librarytechnology.org/libwebcats/?SID=20110508965515136

Is the question really about open source? Are you suggesting to the librarian they should change software (and that doing so would save the school money)? Have you identified options for them to look at e.g Koha, OpenBiblio which just happen to be open source?

 I have looked at it and its still very new, one concern over is is the very bad licence agreement if you contribute to it.

Basically you have to hand over joint rights to your code so instructure can GPL it but they can then also sub licence it under a commercial licence without compensating the original author.

FOSS is definitely an appropriate response to budget cuts. It can generate financial savings in terms of TCO but also provides the robust performance, upgrageability and maintainability required by the education sector.

At my college there has been a very slow adoption of FOSS which has, in the main, been driven by Computing/ICT teaching staff and students. We use software like Blender (3D modelling), Google Sketchup (3D modelling), Greenfoot (Java programming), NetBeans (Java programming) and more widely known FOSS such as Firefox, The GIMP, and OpenOffice. Unfortunately, many of these programs are not installed directly on the college network due to the (unfounded) fears of our IT Services department. We also have some sort of MSDN campus agreement which makes much of MS' proprietary software free or almost free. These, sadly, are the main reasons we don't have a wider deployment of FOSS tools. However, there's more than one way to skin a cat as they say ... We give the students a CD of FOSS tools at the start of the year (OpenEducation CD orientated) which they can install at home. We also give them a copy of Portable Apps which they can run from their memory sticks and/or portable hard-drives.

I am a Linux user at home and at college and often show my students what it can do and run. Many of them have taken the opportunity to download Ubuntu or Linux Mint and install them at home. Also, many of our students have Gmail accounts and have used these to collaboratively work on group-based assignments via Google Docs. Such ease and quality are winning over many students.

The increasing awareness of FOSS is starting to have an impact on the wider college staff to. We moved to a Moodle VLE system two years ago which was a major step forward in "enlightenment" for the SMT and IT Services. The main reason was financial - saving £17,000 p.a. spend on Blackboard - but Moodle has provided us with a robust and easily managed and updated VLE. Such quality (and low cost) will almost certainly win the hearts and minds of many SMTs but it is getting the awareness and understanding going in the first place. Grass roots awareness does eventually work. Are there any quicker methods?

 For me there are a couple of important points.

1. Open Source is a more efficient business model but it still requires some sort of investment for development and maintenance.

2. We are only scraping the surface of possible savings by using a few apps like Google Docs, Inkscape and audacity. We could make massive savings on VLEs, E-portfolios, content etc if the resources were shared out using web technologies rather than dividing them using the existing models where most of the input resources get used up in marketing and cost of sales.

3. There are other areas where technological innovation can massively lower costs but existing brand strength of incumbent suppliers makes it very slow going for smaller players to get sufficient traction to then use the full power of FOSS for all.

Here is some evidence. We provide an Ofqual accredited vocational qualification that is far easier administratively for teachers but does depend on some simple web based technology skills.  We have 17 prisons as customers and estimate we'll save them 150k a year in ICT qualification costs alone. Of course we don't depend on any software that needs a license fee either for the users or ourselves. We are giving away a fully hosted and managed VLE/e-portfolio system as free value-added so potentially no cost there either. If we get more users we can put all the supporting content on the web free as well. We are currently putting the National Curriculum assessment criteria for every subject at every level in the system and pusing that out to Drupal pages where it can be linked to supporting materials. Curriculum on-line but not at a cost of 500 million. < 1% of that budget would do it more effectively.

So what I'm saying is that you need a business model to sustain development but that business model can itself save schools money compared with what they are doing now as well as generate the income needed for development and maintenance of FOSS/CC resources to support education. Furthermore such a strategy has the potential to provide free education to anyone with an internet connection and sustain it. As ever, the biggest problem as with any innovation as with FOSS is getting enough support to get to a critical mass that can sustain it. 

Everything you say is so true. All I would add is that cloud based resources such as Google Apps for Education also offer schools a fantastic and free resource to promote learning in their schools.

 Try GeoGebra www.geogebra.org/webstart/4.0/geogebra-40.jnlp

* it's free and Open Source

* it runs on Mac, Linux & Windows

* Getting nice equations is reasonably easy, type eg:

f(x) = sqrt(sin(x))

FormulaText[f]