Hi All,
To help inform the future direction of the website and to ensure that the website is relevant to you as the user, it is neccesary to understand why people visit the website. Namely, what are the motivations of the Open Source Schools community.
Hi,
We’ve recently reviewed our position statement on Office applications, and part of this is to give schools the option of using OpenOffice in the Curriculum rather than Microsoft Office. We’re now in the process of creating an msi to deploy OO via GPO. This potentially could end up in 400+ schools, so I’m keen to learn if other people have deployed OO via an msi, and if so:
Google announce an Open Source web based operating system for next year. What are the implications for schools? Few thoughts to kick off.
Overall a massive reduction in costs for school ICT to the extent where all written work is done through a terminal.
Our school is starting to put together an Alternative Procurement Business Case (APBC) for ICT provision in BSF.
I am looking to other schools that may be looking at writing or have written an APBC.
Also looking to make a case for using Open Source software within the APBC.
So looking for inspiration and ideas 🙂
Ubuntu Open week is a series of presentations and Q&A sessions on a variety of topics, it uses the IRC freenode network to host them, IRC is a fantastic communication medium, kind of more focussed than Twitter, but more open than instant messaging and more chatty than a web forum. You can read more about open week and the full schedule here
Edubuntu is Ubuntu’s education focussed edition, it includes sets of free applications with an educational focus for different age groups. It also has a focus on manageability in a school environment and can be run as a terminal server to thin clients and regular computers. This talk is about the new features of Edubuntu and will no doubt cover the future directions. If you miss the event the logs will be posted here afterwards.
http://epidm.edgesuite.net/RBI/computerweekly/CWRES/HTML/SurveyResults2.pdf
This highlights the uptake of OSS various sized organisations have done. MS is unsurprisingly the winner. The trialled statistics are interesting.
Implications for education?
1. MS dominates and therefore we should make sure we are using MS products to best prepare our pupils for their futures.
2. Using OSS in education is clearly more important as we remove obstacles to use OSS by providing rich and dependable experiences for our young people who will feed this into industry.
3.
Hi. I’m in a secondary school and as part of our primary liaison/community element I’ve been asked to do an hour with some Year 5s from our Feeder primaries -basically giving them a fun session playing games on the IWB or the computer (prob with ContentGenerator/Class Tools or HotPotatoes) But obviously there needs to be an educational focus and I thought it might be good to introduce them to the concept of OSS.
The OpenOffice.org community anticipate the 100 millionth download around Tuesday.
I know my kids have tons of interactive whiteboards at school. I know they cost a significant amount and there is special software and content for them I have seen demoed at BETT. I have no idea whether good interactive whiteboard support is important or not, but I would like to display my ignorance by throwing out a few questions that a passing teacher with IWB experience may care to answer:
It is a joy to participate in candid exchanges that address the issues faced with an expansion of Open Source use in british schools. My sense is that the OS community does not share a common vision for the use of Open Source and has made assumptions that schools will want to adopt the ego centric approach of the lone artesan. Schools are a co-operative community centered on teaching and learning (or should be!).