Granville Community School adopts open source graphics software to deliver a level 2 course which has been dominated by proprietary graphics software with high licence costs.
Granville School is a 11 to 16 Community Secondary in South Derbyshire. There are 720 pupils and staffing of 40 FTE. The school came out of notice to improve in 2006. It achieved specialist school status in the area of Sport and Modern Foreign Languages in 2008. Exam results now place the school as 4th best performing in the LEA and 11th most improved secondary school in England. Schools Website http://www.granville.derbyshire.sch.uk/
GIMP and Inkscape are both well known open source alternatives to proprietary graphics software. Granville Community School’s aim was to develop learners and staff capabilities in these applications in order for pupils to achieve a Level 2 qualification.
Granville School offers various ICT courses to its learners. Some like the INGOTS are excellent and actively promote equality of opportunity and social inclusion by encouraging the use of free software so that learners and schools are not expected to buy expensive software. We have taken a very popular unit of a very popular level 2 qualification and decided to deliver it using Inkscape and Gimp. The commercially and freely available teaching resources that support this unit have been dominated by specific graphics software which has very expensive licensing costs. These costs can often over stretch a small rural schools ICT budget. The decision to use open source software has allowed us to save thousands in licensing costs and use our budget more efficiently. Learners have made outstanding progress and obtained some excellent transferable skills.
The first step was to train myself in these two applications. As with most things open source many free tutorials were available online in many formats including video. I did find re-training difficult to start with as like many other teachers I was very used using proprietary alternatives. However after a few hours you notice some similarities and learn some new tricks.
The second step was for me to go through the assessment criteria of this particular unit and be sure that the software was able to produce outcomes that would meet each criterion. All but one criterion could be easily achieved using GIMP and Inkscape. This particular criterion needed pupils to produce an expanding or drop down web menu for a top level mark. However this could easily be achieved by using some very simple CSS and Javascript.
I decided to give pupils 6 weeks (15 hours) worth of skills building lessons in these applications. After this pupils were able start a real piece of coursework. Before taking the decision to use Gimp and Inkscape to deliver this unit I posted on various forums for other’s views. Nobody recommended an open source applications to complete this unit. What is being demonstrated at Granville Community School is quiet unique and exciting. We are in a position where all our pupils will have used an open source graphics packages to pass a level 2 qualification, which many teachers think can only be passed at the highest level using proprietary software. Sample Work
By using open source software there is a clear financial benefit to the school. Saving money on licensing enabled our school to re-direct some clash flow and use monetary resources more efficiently. We have taken a decision to cancel our annual licence of some proprietary graphics software that we did have which will save the school over £3000. We could have gone the other way and spent more than £3000 on a site license for what seems to be the standard software for delivering this unit.
The benefit to our learners is huge. Firstly they are able to complete homework very easily as the software they are using is freely available. By gaining the experience of downloading open source software, installing and using it at home learners ICT capability grows. Learners found other free software using sites such as sourceforge. This in a way encouraged independency and learning to learn. By using this software at Granville we have promoted equality of opportunity and social inclusion by not expect learners to buy expensive software at home in order to be compatible with the school.
Many parents at a KS4 review day commented how their children had come home and downloaded GIMP and Inkscape. They were engaged in practicing and learning new skills in their spare time at home. Details of how to obtain this software was also sent out on a termly school newsletter due to the interest it had aroused.
The main challenge was changing some pupil and staff attitudes towards open source software. There is still some false negative perceptions in schools regarding free and open source software. These include a view that open source software is incompatible and of inferior quality. These perceptions have both been challenges through this small project.
Both Inskscape and Gimp 2.0 have worked very well on our Windows XP environment. Much free support and training is available from many websites and videos are available on youtube.
Thanks for this article. It is so refreshing to find schools using these excellent tools, I particularly liked the navigation bar in the samples. I will pass this on to my SLT to try and convince them to take open-source more seriously.
Many thanks