The Open Source Schools presentation at BETT on Saturday 17th January was very well received, with good numbers joining the team in the Olympia's Club Room, despite the early start. Miles Berry introduced the presentation, outlining what open source means as well as exploring some of the advantages which it offers to schools; he also spoke about Moodle and the Open Source Schools community. Michelle Walters talked about Open Office and some of the ways which teachers could get started with open source. José Picardo talked about the Audacity audio editor and Doug Belshaw discussed some of the many ways in which he's using Linux powered netbooks in his school. Audience members took Ubuntu and OpenEducationDisc CDs away with them so they could try open source software out for themselves.

The presentation was filmed in association with BBC Backstage and Learn4Life, with Leon Cych of Learn4Life doing some impressive work editing the video for the web. Leon's also written about the presentation on his own site.

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This article reflects the experiences and findings of the project team in the early part of the project. We make no claim that it is a representative sample. We hope you will add to the range and substance, through comments, postings in the Forum and perhaps by submitting a Case study, and the article will be updated in due course to incorporate extra material.

OSS desktops

JISC’s Regional Support Centre for North and East Scotland has won this year’s Scottish Open Source Award for Educational Excellence for its AccessApps initiative, designed particularly for FE and HE but of interest also to schools.