Has Free Software Saved Any Schools?

morcego asks: "I think everyone remembers the case of PCs for Kids, the Australian group that donates computers for the poor children, when Microsoft asked them lots of money for the software on the computers they donated. I am trying to convince schools to start using free software, and I have heard arguments like 'all free software initiatives in public schools around the world have failed.' I know this is not true, but I need cases to show them. So, do you know of any school (public or not), or other educational institution that has been saved from paying large amounts of money (and closing its doors) by free software?" For those interested in this topic, you'll probably want to read up on the latest salvo in the Microsoft private antitrust settlement. It sounds like education, and Open Source, may now have an official relationship, and things are now getting kicked into high gear. While it's good to hear about the "SchoolForge" coalition (no relation to SourceForge or NewsForge), what educational resources are currently available to schools from the Open Source arena?

Comments

StarOffice is being used!

[Anonymous Coward]

Where? Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada.

For those of you who don't know MJ is a city of about 30,000. My girlfriend's little sister (gr 3. I think), needed to write a letter one day when she was over visiting. I said I don't have Office, but I have staroffice which is pretty much the same. "Don't worry that is what we are learning in school". I was shocked and thrilled.

I am 99% sure that they were using a windows version of StarOffice, but it is still free.

~S

Although...

[Anixamander]

One of the arguments (which I consider fallacious) against Macs in the schools is that kids need to be prepared for the "real world," one that involves a Microsoft OS and Microsoft applications. As Linux has yet to be embraced on the desktop to a great extent in the business world (still largely relegated to server duties), does Open Source hinder their abilities to function in the business world? Furthermore, are the support people in these schools equipped to deal with the support issues of a new platform? Linux may indeed be easier to support than its windows counterpart, but without the appropriate training (which is always hard to come by when delaing with public school funding) it may be difficult.

Ideally, schools would shift their software budget to a training budget to bring their support gurus up to speed. And the children would gain a comfort level with technology, though not necessarily the technology they will be using in the real world. Unfortunately, I have more questions than answers here.

I'd be interested in hearing a reasoned response to my questions. Dogmatic zealots need not apply.

Wrong question!

[bluGill]

This is the wrong question. The right question is why computers in school.

Learning is universial, not applied. You need to learn to reading writing, and arithmatic. There is no need for comptuers in that. Sure there are some good computer programs to help there, and typing is a skill that needs to be learned, but computers are the implimentation detail, not the meat. Until you have something to do with the comptuer there is no point in having one. Young kids need to learn to write things out by hand.

Yes computers are important to the world today, but comptuers change fast. when I first started with computers wordStar was the big program in industry. In High school they braged that we were learning the latest word processor that industry is using, wordPerfect 5.1 for dos. And at the time it was the biggest, but today everyone is using Word 2000, and looking at an upgrade to that. Teach the kids to think with whatever tool is avaiable, and you will be fine, but teach them that the tool currently in vogue is the only one to use and you do them a disservice.

Yes I know industry has a lot of obsolete, but fast enough comptuers they would love to donate to any charity that will take them, but that doesn't mean you have to take them. A computer is a means to many good ends, but do not allow a computer to become the end itself.

Re:Wrong question!

[dillon_rinker]

There is no need for comptuers in that.
You are wrong. Computers are a force multiplier for teachers; rather than one thread of instruction at a time, there can be many. For $30,000, you can get one teacher or 20 computers...do the math. (Warning - minor parental boasting ahead). I have a child in kindergarten who is learning to read. Most of his classmates are not. Why? Because the school has reading software that paces itself to the student. This is a supplement to the curriculum, not the main curriculum. The kids can learn at their own pace; those who can progress farther faster have an opportunity to do so that they wouldn't have before.

So, this is nice and all, but why do I think it's necessary? Most of the world will work for pennies on the dollar compared to US workers. The only advantage future workers in the US will have are in the educational opportunities offered to them. The more opportunities my kid has, the more likely he'll be able to compete against coders in India.

In High school they braged that we were learning the latest word processor that industry is using, wordPerfect 5.1 for dos.
I assume this was in a class designed to give you a job right out of highschool; otherwise, you're correct - the curriculum designers were morons. You should have been using a multiple free word processors to study concepts common to all word-processing systems, such as cut, paste, format, etc. You should have been considering information as a stream of bytes, as in Word Perfect, or a collection of objects, as in Word. You should have learned timeless concepts, not rapidly obsoleted procedures...

do not allow a computer to become the end itself.
Hear, hear. I knew of a principal who bought computers for his school because he'd promised parents that their students would spend an hour a week using computers. As much as we all enjoyed playing Oregon Trail, I never learned anything from it. I certainly didn't learn anything by playing it week after week. On the other hand, I learned a great deal that remains with me to this day (though I'm not sure of its immediate applicability) when my science teacher had us spend an hour running a simulation of the process that seismologists use to measure the distance to epicenters of earthquakes, and using that information to pinpoint the epicenter of a quake. That one hour solidified in my mind everything we'd learned about earthqukes during the previous two weeks.

our high school uses apache

[madmancarman]

After having tons of problems with NT 4 and IIS crashing our high school's web server on a daily basis, we switched to Apache on RedHat 5.2 (about 3 years ago). Since then, we've switched machines a couple times (as better machines are hand-me-downed to us) and upgraded the Linux distro, but we've had great uptime.

The success of our web server allowed us to push for a perl/apache/linux-based attendance system that let us get rid of scan-tron sheets to be filled in every morning. Now, our teachers open up their web browsers in the morning, log in, and they check off their absent students 1st period. In the afternoon, they can check who was here and who wasn't, and it saves us about a ream of paper per day, since we don't have to print out attendance bulletins any more. Most of the work for the attendance program was done by one of my students who was learning perl on the fly.

I also teach a class for A+ and Network+ certifications, but we cover Linux both semesters (especially when we do network security in Network+). I'm hoping that next semester, we'll be able to use Linux as the primary desktop OS for most of the networking stuff, but we'll have to see what happens.

There are two major problems, in my opinion: businesses want students who are proficient with Windows and Office, and schools don't have the resources to hire people who are competent Linux admins. If the demand for Linux users starts going up, then maybe the number of computers running Linux in schools will increase, but for now, it's probably limited to servers.

One funny tidbit - earlier this school year, Code Red and Nimda running on local districts' NT/2000 IIS web servers took down the WAN access for most of the schools in Southwest Ohio. Seems that the servers weren't patched or maintained as well as they should have been. Web servers running Apache, of course, didn't have this problem.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -Ghandi

Re:One blessing....

[Bonker]

The more difficult it is to use bootleg commercial software, the easier it is to see the value of free stuff.

This is an important point. Most of the grade school teachers I've ever met who deal with computers have the attitude that anything short of organized for-profit software piracy is okay because they're teachers. They *have* to teach students on a limited budjet, are used to stretching any school supply just as far as it will go, and see copying software they've bought for home use, or ordering only one copy of windows to install on every computer in a lab as a necessity.

This is the same thing as making xerox copies out of a book to hand out to their students, as far as most of them are concenred.

Now, I'm personally inclined to agree with the morality of this little ethical short cut. I have a lot of problems with software licenses, and I think it would be a wonderful thing if being a teacher really meant you were exempt from copyright law for educational purposes.

You can bet that Microsoft, Adobe, Corel, and the other members of the BSA don't agree with me, however.

If you start stressing this fact, Free Software just starts seeming like a better and better idea in the classroom.

Not Saved...but aided

[Luminous]

I know of one school in particular, the school my boss sends her kid to, that has benefited tremendously. My boss is a Microsoft devotee and has scoffed at the Free Software movement, until she went to a school meeting and realized the computer lab that was donated (just the systems and OS nothing else) wasn't up and running yet. The reason was the school didn't have the money for Microsoft Office.

Long story short, she told me, I pointed her to StarOffice and a few other apps that are readily available. It wasn't a difficult sell, because it was the difference between getting use out of the computers or just teaching Windows. The school wouldn't have 'collapsed' without the free software and they would have gotten the money for the applications next year, but now they can use that money to implement a replacement program for the systems they already have.

All of this goes back to the fact that there is a bias against Free licenses on software. My boss always considered them to be amateurish, less reliable, than the NAME BRAND software. Not anymore.

Re:It isn't just free software

[Syberghost]

When you have servers that have uptimes of two years (or more), something tells me that some of those servers are, more or less, a fire-and-forget system. Anybody who sets up a server right WON'T need to maintain it much.

As long as there are no users being added, no programs being added, and you only have a handful of systems, you might be right.

But let's say you have 200 systems, with a mean time between failures of 56,000 hours each.

That's one failure every 12 days, more or less.

A school has dozens or hundreds of systems, with much shorter MTBF on the physical hardware, and has hundreds of students using those machines. They require security monitoring, hardware replacement, software configuration and upgrading; near-constant attention, if it's larger than one server and a handful of clients.

If I take any one of my servers and point at it and base my manpower computations on that server alone, the numbers will look deceptively like I can do it all myself. When I broaden my sights out to all of the several hundred large servers I manage, I instead get a 7-man team rotating on-call duties between 3 production and 5 test projects, and the thought of doing it all myself becomes laughable.

A typical school is somewhere in the middle if you want to use computers for education, instead of (as I said) sticking a few PCs in the physics lab and letting the brightest students do WTF the want with them.

If you just want to stick a file server in the secretary's office and put a PC on each of the administrator's desks, you're probably right. But I'm talking about a school using computers for educating the kids, not a school using computers near the kids.

European schools (and a mini-rant).

[Hiro Antagonist]

You'll have better luck looking at schools in Europe, especially Germany, France, and the U.K. The U.S. public school system moves about as quickly as a lowered Honda Civic in an off-road rally race; and, in my experience, most public school IS/IT administrators know less about computers than John Ashcroft does about electron field dynamics. This is why few high schools have local area networks or decent internet access, and why fewer still have classes in things as simple as programming in Basic.

Since U.S. schools aren't adeqately funded by the government, they gobble up as much of the private-sector "technology money" as they can possibly gorge themselves on; a signifigant chunk of which comes in the form of discounted licenses for Microsoft software. Kind of ironic that the school still has to buy the computers to run the software (and keep them updated); but I guess by reducing their profit margin from 99.998% to 98%, Microsoft has done their part. Those computers have to be upgraded pretty regularly, of course, and some of the money for that comes from "less worthwhile" programs -- like English, Art, Music, and History.

We are raising a generation of Americans that won't know the difference between a verb and a posessive pronoun, but they'll be able to use the Word grammar-checker, so it all works out in the end, right?

These, among other reasons, are why the U.S. imports its computer engineers from Europe and southeast Asia.

By contrast, European schools don't get the same deep discounts, and the foreign-language support in Windows is pretty horrible (although W2K has made some signifigant improvements in this area). European schools (at least in the three countries mentioned above) are supported wholly by the state, and as such don't require outside funding. This means that, for the most part, the software and hardware are chosen to fit the needs of the instructors and students, rather than to fit the discounts, freebies, and funding-with-strings requirements assigned by the technology companies.

This is why you'll find SuSE, Mandrake, and Debian pretty heavily used in many European schools (and thus, businesses).

But that's just my opinion; I could be wrong.

While free is good...

[hether]

I can see plenty of problems with implementing Linux in schools, especially when I think about how it would go in my local district.

1. All the teachers know Windows. My bet is that even many of the computer teachers do not know Linux well enough to run it in their labs. They can't teach it if they don't know it and teacher training could be expensive and take a lot of what's probably considered unnecessary time.

2. They would have a lot harder teaching a completely new OS AND classes on how to use the programs than to just teach the programs. You'd probably have to have a intro to Linux class before you could ever teach whichever programs you choose to use - and that's another issue in itself.

3. Students probably have Windows at home. Would they have problems with converting documents between systems? Say you create your report in Word at home, could your bring it school and use it there?

4. The local tech support and computer stores would not be able to help them if something went wrong. 99% of the techs around here don't know anything about anything other than Windows. Who would know enough about Linux to help them??

5. The students would learn programs and OSes that would different with what they would have when they go to college, go to work, etc. Since there are very few offices and colleges using entirely Linux, they would be at a disadvantage right away.

Of course there are a lot of plusses too, but these negatives sprang to mind right away. Of course they are all refutable. I think that the schools would choose easy and expensive over difficult and cheap any day. If they didn't have a choice and were nearly out of money, my guess is they would let the computers sit/