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

Here's One

[ScumBiker]

It's used in Albion, WI. Redhat on older Gateway hardware. It sits right along side of the Win95 and Mac boxen. I'm pretty sure they're going to be installing it on the rest of the x86 boxen.

Hmmmm

[seanmeister]

"what educational resources are currently available to schools from the Open Source arena?"

How about "source code"?

Re:Hmmmm

[Sj0]

That's what school sysadmins are for.

Besides, hardware configuration stopped being an issue under Linux very recently. The last time I had to configure something manually was RedHat 6.0. Ever since RedHat 6.2, the Kudzu(spelling on that? I rarely invoke it manually) program run at bootup would detect any hardware changes. Makes swapping IDE devices, PCI devices, and even ISA PnP devices very easy -- just boot up. Puts the Windows "Windows requires that you touch your nose three times, stand on your head, and insert the disk labelled "I downloaded this off the internet" to continue." device installation to shame.

Remember, in a place like a school, with a bunch of bored kids, there will be a sysadmin ready to fix any problems which arise from the kids antics("I put my comb in the floppy drive, now it's stuck in there!"). Sticking a boot disk into a drive to install Linux over FTP or NFS is a piece of cake(assuming the floppy drive works :)).

Re:Hmmmm

[gorillasoft]

Often, schools do not have their own sysadmin at every single campus. They sometimes have ONE sysadmin that has to cover all of the campuses in the district. This means they will not have time for every little thing.

Also, if you have seen what they pay sysadmins in many districts, you will know that it could be quite difficult to hire a good admin that knows Linux as well as MS or whatever.

I'm not saying to give up hope; I'm just putting more light on the situation.

Re:Hmmmm

[Grab]

Nope, there'll be a computer studies teacher. There's no guarantee that the computer studies teacher knows shit about the subject beyond teaching the kids how to use Word, Excel and Outlook.

When I was a lad (back in the "good old days") our computer studies teacher was a waste of space (and there was a lot of her occupying a lot of space!). The school computers back then were BBC B's - marvellous! Anyway, she knew shit about the whole thing, and basically had to be tutored from scratch on how to run a network by those of us pupils who knew about how it worked. I mean, not just unfamiliar with methods on that network, but with the whole concept.

More often than not, you'll find the computer studies teacher is someone who'd previously done maths or something at uni, and happens to know more than the other teachers about computers. This does not mean they're any damn good at it!

I realise I'm generalising here, but schools really can't afford a good sysadmin - hell, most can't afford teachers and books!

Grab.

Re:Hmmmm

[SoftwareJanitor]

If there is a shortage of sysadmin resources then Linux is probably an even better answer compared to Microsoft. One central sysadmin can usually maintain a lot more Linux boxes remotely than Windows boxes, at least that has been my experience where I've worked. The only problem I can see is that schools are not as networked as they should be, which means that sysadmins may have to make more personal appearances than is typically necessary in a business environment. But the fact that Linux is generally more secure(able) than Windows or Macs (Macs are fairly network secure because they provide almost no inbound services - but as a broad generality they aren't as secure from the console as Linux is because they aren't designed for multiple users), and more reliable should also make it a win in reduction of need for sysadmin resources as a whole.

As for it supposedly being more difficult to hire a good admin that knows Linux, it just doesn't seem to hold true. There are just as many good admins out there who know Linux as there are that know MS. Chances are it will be difficult to hire a good admin for what school districts pay, but it shouldn't be any more difficult for Linux than for MS. Look around at salary surveys -- experienced admins don't get paid that much differently based on platform.

I think you need to examine your light again because you are buying into too many of the MS marketing promises that don't hold up. They want you to believe that any idiot who buys a bunch of "Exam Cram" books and gets a little certificate (after paying them a nice chunk of change) is qualified to administer your network. But it is a false economy to hire an idiot to administer your network because -- you then have an idiot administering your network.

Re:Hmmmm

[MrResistor]

But it's certainly reasonable to expect a high school or even grade school level programming instructor to use source as instructional aids; either as real world examples or as projects for the students to work on.

Assuming that their existing hardware is fairly homogenous (not much of a stretch, since most schools buy their PCs in $50-100k chunks) they could deal with the install the same way they deal with their current Windows installs: One drive image that get's cloned to whatever drive needs it. Anyone who doesn't believe that school computers get reimaged at least once a month is living in a fantasy land. Kids are remarkably ingeneous when it comes to hosing up computers. The idea of relying on a preinstall with rescue disks in that environment is insane. They'd have to have techs working 24/7.

Re:Hmmmm

[MrResistor]

Floppy drive?!?!?!?

What kind of barbarian are you?!?!?

Seriously though, the Linux distos I've installed recently have had excellent cd-boot, much better than Windows. The only reason you'd need a floppy is if you're BIOS doesn't support boot from CD.

Definately have to agree about the sorry state of Windows "PnP", though.

Re:Hmmmm

[SoftwareJanitor]

Snide? If I wanted to be snide, I would have been meaner than that... :-) I never said it wouldn't be hard to find a good Linux admin for what school districts want to pay -- just that I don't believe it to be any harder than finding a good MS admin for what they want to pay. Good admins aren't cheap regardless of platform. Idiots are cheap regardless of platform. I just don't see any advantage on Microsoft's side when it comes to the real costs of getting your sysadmin needs fulfilled, and I will stick by that.

Re:Hmmmm

[larkost]

Small point, but newer Mac's running MacOS X can actually be made more secure, as the OS is made for this and the Firmware can be locked and set to disalow booting off of any other media, and then if you have a kensington lock on the back, there is no way you can get at the protected files without either the password or damaging the computer extensively, while still being able to use the computer normally. This makes the most securable computer I have seen in a lab environment.

Re:Hmmmm

[spudnic]

You are correct about the use of images in schools, at least at the ones I was at. I worked as a consultant for 13 small to medium sized school districts for 4 years, so I have some insight into this.

School district admins wouldn't even listen to a suggestion of putting Linux on desktops. The rational? Well, I've listed a few:

1) "The kids need to learn on the types of computers that they will be using in a typical office. They need to know how to use Word and Excel."

- I know they could develop the same skills by using an alternative, but the name recognition thing is really important. Parents would be up in arms at the next school board meeting if they heard their kids weren't going to learn about spreadsheets using Excel.
2) "We can't run Accelerated Reader and the other programs that are essential to teaching on Linux."

- This is a huge argument. AR is used a lot in most schools. It helps teachers not actually have to teach anything. If you're not familiar with it, it's a pretty simple program that tests a students understanding of a book after they have read it. There was some chance of using the old DOS version on Linux, but we haven't been able to run the Windows version under wine. The program would be trivial to duplicate, but the real value is in all of the thousands of tests that are available for it.

3) "Windows doesn't cost that much money for us, and most of our grants specify a certain portion of the funds for software purchase."

- This is true. I know we where spending like $21 for a Windows 98 license, $45 for NT. And, the federal grants that we where writing (and helped spend the money from ;) for the schools required us to allocate for the purchase of OS and application programs or the proposal would be rejected. I'm sure we could appeal if this where the case, but schools don't like to risk it. Every t must be crossed, every i dotted, and the staple has to be in exact right spot.
4) "We don't need to worry about maintaining desktops. Each teacher has a boot disk for all of the machines in their room that will automatically reimage the system if there is some sort of problem. Network apps and updates are provided via NAL or something similiar based on the user logged in, so we don't even have to touch a system to allow access to new programs."

- The same system could be used by Linux, but because the same thing could be said about Windows it doesn't help the argument in their minds.

Now I want to be clear that every one of the school systems that I worked in had at least one, usually quite a few, Linux boxes performing functions behind the scenes. After talking to some of the IT directors recently I found that these boxes where all just running perfectly. And they loved that, they just run.

Re:Hmmmm

[psamuels]

I fail to see how this is any better than *nix.

...because it is Unix. MacOS X == FreeBSD + custom GUI toolkit + various compatibility layers to make it look, feel and work like MacOS 9. Remember?

Re:Hmmmm

[psamuels]

Ok correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't any x86 comouter witha NIC with a proper EPROM network boot?

You're assuming that the NIC has a boot EPROM. Remember, this is the same computer whose BIOS can't boot from CDROM.

Remember, until a couple years ago the most popular NIC in the world was the ISA-based 3c509 series. [The RTL-8139 and 2114x chipsets are probably winning now.] And there are a lot of old Cabletron E2100s and NE2000s out there as well.

an interesting site

[MoceanWorker]

you should check out OpenSourceSchools. it's a great site that focuses on Open Source in the education system

Re:an interesting site

[yesthatguy]

If they're really worried about that, there are open-source related certifications available. RHCE comes to mind, but I know I've heard of a few others.

What about foreign schools?

[alsta]

I think it would be interesting to hear what schools in other countries have done about this. Not because I doubt that American schools have done it, but because it would show how universal an Open Source solution could be.

Re:What about foreign schools?

[KjetilK]

The Norwegian Skolelinux has worked hard and has been tested on some schools, and has received some money in governmental grants, but I guess has yet to really go mainstream.

One blessing....

[ZoneGray]

One thing working in your favor, ironicly enough, is Windows Product Activation. The more difficult it is to use bootleg commercial software, the easier it is to see the value of free stuff.

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.

Re:One blessing....

[Grab]

Exactly. The more difficult (and expensive) it is to use Microsoft software on corporate machines, the more likely it is that Microsoft won't be the chosen solution.

Grab.

Re:One blessing....

[ZoneGray]

Hmmm... "Moderation Totals: Redundant=1, Interesting=1, Informative=1, Overrated=1"

C'mon gang. I just need Troll, Flamebait, and Funny, and I'll have hit for the cycle. Please help.

(BTW, if you're good at math, you should be able to deduce which of the three haven't been used yet.)

Re:One blessing....

[MrResistor]

The drives in most schools (at least for the lab boxen) get reimaged at least once a month. How will that be effected by product activation? If product activation gets in the way of reimaging at the drop of a hat school IT departments are going to be very unhappy.

Most schools keep their licensing up to date, yes, but having to prove it everytime some kid installs AOL Instant Messanger on a lab PC places an undue burden on an already stretched IT staff. (When I worked in a school lab AIM was the most common reason for reimaging. It hosed up the Algebra package we used, which was the primary purpose of those PCs.)

It is precisely the need to keep all their licensing ducks in a row that prevents schools from buying the corporate version of their chosen Windows flavor. The corporate version is generally at least $100 more per station, and schools simply can't afford that. In my experience, schools generally have maybe 20 boxen running corporate (if they have some sort of admin class, otherwise there's no justification for the added expense in the eyes of the school board) and the rest run the home version.

Re:One blessing....

[MrResistor]

What about Underrated? Or does that not exist anymore? I haven't been given mod points in a while...

Re:One blessing....

[MrResistor]

Actually, there are usually large blocks that are the same. You can generally assume that all the boxen in one room are the same. One reason is the ability to apply one drive image to as many systems as possible is incredibly important in that environment. Another is that schools usually get a large single grant to buy new computers every 3 years or so, anywhere from $20-100k, and it's a lot easier to buy in bulk.

I totally agree about XP though. Not only is the new interface useless, it's also butt-ugly.

Re:One blessing....

[laserjet]

I had mod points a few days ago and it was still in the list.

you can relax now.

Re:One blessing....

[MrResistor]

The question has been answered :)

I'd say so, yes.

[Bowie J. Poag]

A couple guys I know of started an organization called the OSEF, or Open Source Education Foundation. They basically assemble machines and networks from spare parts, go out to a school and install the gear, free of charge. I know of at least one school they've helped, in downtown Tucson. About a dozen machines remotely administrated from a central server in the back room. Google for them, you might find a link or two.

It isn't just free software

[meckardt]

Think about it for a second. There are three elements of the equation here: Hardware, Software, and Operations. If we are talking about computers to be used by a school, then first you have to have the boxes, then you have to have something to run on the boxes, and then you have to have somebody who knows how to make it all work. Of the three, the last is probably the biggest expense, and certainly the one that you aren't going to get for free. Even if its just a tech savvy teacher who maintains the things, its going to take a lot of his time to do so... time taken away from his primary job of teaching the kids. QED, it has a cost.

Re:It isn't just free software

[sirket]

A good computer system does not need a lot of maintenance. Besides which, in any school you can find technologically savvy kids. Make them a part of the computer team that maintains the network. Many a school is run in this way.

Besides which, it sounds as if you are saying that a Windows alternative would require _less_ maintenance than a Unix solution. If a teacher has the skills to handle a Unix system, then that configuration will require a lot less time than the eqwuivalent Microsoft solution.

-sirket

Re:It isn't just free software

[geekoid]

true, but thats true regardless of OS. So why not choose an OS that doesn't have a liscense, and is a good learning tool?
If its a high school, you have the computer class run the operations. Perferable the new student would be traind by student who where doing it the previouse year, under supervision, of course.

Re:It isn't just free software

[Syberghost]

A good computer system does not need a lot of maintenance.

Horseshit. Any non-trivial setup needs quite a bit of maintainence, and a school needs a non-trivial setup if you want to get any non-trivial use out of it. Otherwise it's doorstop PCs in the wings of the physics class getting used by half a dozen kids a year.

The answer for small schools is going to have to be outsourcing.

Re:It isn't just free software

[bribecka]

A good computer system does not need a lot of maintenance.

Even if this is true (which it really isn't), you're thinking of the amount of maintenance required when a relatively tech-savvy person is using it.

Now, think about schools. There are multiple users going on/off the computer each day, installing things, deleting things, many of the students *trying* to mess the system up. There is a lot more maintenance when (for example) 1 out of 10 students is trying to crash the machine so they don't have to do work. My mom teaches high school--she has had students do a lot of crazy shit to the computers, from deleting software to cutting the friggin power cords with scissors. Now, *that* kind of stuff doesn't happen in the real employment world.

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.

Re:It isn't just free software

[SuiteSisterMary]

Servers have high uptime BECAUSE of proper maintenance, not DESPITE proper maintenance.

Re:It isn't just free software

[Jason Earl]

Actually this is precisely why Linux has the potential to be such a big win. Rolling out software to Windows desktops requires a ton of work, maintaining each of those fragile beasts requires even more work. Have you ever seen the systems at your typical school. They are a mess.

Now imagine that the school took their money and bought one commodity Intel-based server and a great big pile of inexpensive thin-clients (like the ThinkNic). Adding or updating the software for your system now is a snap. You upgrade your server and the clients have immediate access to the new software. No CDs to lug around, no reboots, no problems. Heck, the administrator wouldn't even have to be on site. One quick "apt-get install foo-package" and it's done. Accounting, security, and other user management tools have existed for Unix forever. You can easily set quotas for nearly every resource that is available to end users and you can monitor your Linux server to the nth degree without leaving the comfort of your bedroom.

Thin clients have been seen as the systems administrator's Nirvana for years, but it wasn't until Linux came along that there was really any useful software that would run on these systems. However, the combination of StarOffice + Mozilla is starting to look like a compelling combination. Especially in places like schools where money is tight and where it is important that the computers both allow easy collaboration and tight security. All of the students would essentially be sharing the same machine (making it easy to work on projects together), but none of them would have write access to any system files (much better security than Windows PCs).

The trick of course, is in removing the PCs. That would leave the school with one server and a pile of essentially disposable devices. If you think replacing Windows PCs with Linux PCs, then you are almost certainly correct, the Linux solution would be more difficult to administer (or more expensive anyway as it would require a much more savvy administrator). However, if you replaced the hordes of Windows PCs with a single Linux server then even the slowest Windows admin could probably find the time to learn to administer Linux.

Re:It isn't just free software

[Syberghost]

Uhhh...so how is this different from Windoze machines? Are we trying to compare the two or not?

Different in the number of people it takes to maintain it correctly. That's about it.

Oh, it's easier to maintain the Linux machines from off-site, but it's doable with Windows too.

The key is the fact that it takes fewer people to maintain the Linux systems, and that it's easier to set them up so that the kids can't screw them up.

But with either, it's going to take outsourcing for the smaller schools to afford to do it right. Right now they're mostly doing it wrong. Mostly.

Re:It isn't just free software

[markmoss]

madfgurtbn: No, what you really need is some law enforcement. I assume this is a high-school, right? The vandals are old enough to be tried as adults then -- give a few of them a night in jail, plus six months of their weekends cleaning up the city park or something, and it might become possible to actually _teach_ at the school. But as it is, in most places (1) the school won't call the cops in the first place, except for making a drawing of a gun, and (2) if they do get busted, they get yelled at a bit and turned loose.

Re:It isn't just free software

[markmoss]

Actually, I'd hire a Linux administrator first. His first job: call around and find companies that are scrapping out their 100MHz machines because they are outmoded -- but will really zip under Linux. Then you need a tiny budget for an install CD. The one thing I don't know about is finding applications -- how many educational programs are there for Linux (or other *nix), and will the mainstream Windows programs run under Wine?

The problem with Windoze systems in schools is that it is not obviously necessary to start with a good administrator -- so the schools never hire one, and so they rarely get much out of the systems except for a few kids that tinker with them. Not that those kids are getting a proper training as administrators either...

Re:It isn't just free software

[JWW]

You can turn the PC's into thin clients.

See: Linux Terminal Server Project

That's what you could do with the PC's. They talk on the site about building both the server and the terminals out of PC's.

Thin client are the way to go. Easier to support, maintain, roll out software to, etc.

Re:It isn't just free software

[Jason Earl]

That's a good point. I have a 486 X terminal at home, and I am always surprised at how well it works. If you had a lot of volunteer work (or if the machines all had the same video card :), and very little money this would certainly be the way to go.

Re:It isn't just free software

[Jason Earl]

From my experience it only takes making an example of one (or perhaps two) vandals before the rest realize that they have better uses for their time.

Chances are good you already have some prime suspects (am I not right), so dig up some evidence.

Re:It isn't just free software

[Syberghost]

The original point of this article was Free Software, and how administrative cost is the most significant aspect of system operations. Since software updates and user additions are a part of _ANY_ coputer system, and are not specific to a Microsoft or Free Software solution, why are you involving them?

I'm not; I'm responding to a post by someone who claimed that if you have machines with long uptimes, no maintenance will be required.

I was showing how a school doesn't just have servers, it has desktops that must be maintained as well. I was further showing that long uptimes are deceptive, because even if every individual machine runs for a very long period of time, a large group of machines will have frequent failures, not all just go out at once.

MTBF is just that; MEAN time. As in average. Not "guaranteed exact time of failure."

If you have 2 years of MTBF, as the poster implied, and you have 24 systems, that's a failure a month. Long individual uptimes don't mean no maintainance is required, they just tell you how much workload will be likely for maintainance.

Many schools make the mistake that poster is making; assuming that it is possible to set systems up so that they'll require no maintainance. It isn't; not with the money schools can spend.

Everybody's accusing me of being anti-Free-Software here, but nothing could be further from the truth; I believe that the best thing schools can do is outsource their computer maintainance, and instead of saying "we want Windows" they should say "we need to do this and this and this" and let the outsourcer set up the best way to acheive those goals in a maintainable manner. I'm confident that will often involve free software, and when it doesn't it will often involve Open Systems (I.E., things like a Sun server and a bunch of SunRay thin clients), and only rarely a Windows-based solution.

I make my living running non-Windows solutions, it's laughable in the extreme to call me pro-Windows. Hell, I'm making my wife buy a laptop so I can take Windows off the last remaining workstation in my house that dual-boots it.

An anonymous school in Ontario, Canada

[Sj0]

We're using RedHat 7.1 to host webpages here, which has saved quite a bit against the cost of a copy of W2k Pro. Also, if we weren't running Linux, our aging IBM server (60 MHZ, 64 MB of ram) would need to be replaced.

In addition to that, we use Linux in our Cisco networking academies classroom because we can't get any of the software we would need under NT (no doubt it exists, but it would be hard to find, possibly expensive, and likely non-standard). We can use the free FTP, TFTP, and HTTP servers on paticularly ancient PCs(one of our more powerful machines is a 75 Mhz machine with two gigs of SCSI drive!) without the hassles of running Windows (windows will now reboot...).

There was a plan a few years ago to turn the ancient machines on the network into X clients, for which they would be quick, but they are now sluggish W2K machines.

ahh, open source

[vorovsky]

I work as a pc/network technician in a school district with about 3000 students in Texas. Basically all of our pc's run the standard with 98/office 2000. I have however convinced my boss to let me put up a slackware server that we use for hosting a few of our web pages and may start doing some routing for our district. Anyway, I have wanted to try to get something like this going on here, but everyone is so stuck to using -only- office 2k that they would refuse to switch to an open source alternative. If anyone has any suggestions on what I could do to maybe get things going here, please let me know. I would love to get away from paying outrageous win/office license fees.

Re:ahh, open source

[RedOregon]

Set them up with the StarOffice 6.0 beta for windows machines. Once they get used to that (shouldn't take long) then tell them the _same_ interface is used in Linux, then start on the money angle.

Re:ahh, open source

[geekoid]

take it to the people.

Get a list of costs for the Win system
Get a list of costs for the Linux system.

Be sure to include the costs of any upgrades that may be neccessary.

Be sure they understand Windows new Liscensing.
Make them get a lawyer review both liscense.
Point out the eduacational benifit of each system.

Explain to parents that little Jimmy's education(and there tax dollars)is being wasted on upgrades and liscencing fees.

Have them go to the school board.

Another appraoch, talk to local politicians who use education on there platform, and inform them of how much money they can save the system, and how forward thinking about education they would be by going with a system that encourges learning, is cheaper, and has all the tools they need, so no application costs on top of the OS costs.

Computer Lab

[fishybell]

Here at Westminster College, Salt Lake City Utah, we have a dozen-or-so-computer lab where every computer is running linux. I'm not quite sure, but I'm pretty sure that it is also the only non-classroom computer lab on campus. No there are not any classes that teach/use linux, but there is a horde of geeks that are every bit as useful as the teachers.

Sofia, Bulgaria

[Anonymous Coward]

the University of Sofia is using Linux as the primary operating system in most of the computer rooms to teach students Operating Systems and to handle the internal info. they also use NT workstations for Java and C/C++ education (for C they use Borland C/C++ 3.5 but i really think they must move on to GCC)

so, it looks like this:
-Linux for advanced students and general management
-NT for beginners

Re:Sofia, Bulgaria

[VP]

Unfortunately the Borg has deemed the technological development of this University as worthy for assimilation, so according to this article MS and Compaq are donating computers running MS Windows...

Stuyvesant High School

[sirket]

Stuyvesant uses Linux for their shell machines, mail servers, web proxies and DNS servers. They also use Linux for a majorityof their lab computers. Many desktops still use Windows, but until office comes out for Linux, things will probably stay that way.

-sirket

Northern Territory Schools, Australia

[phlako66]

This article on OpenSourceSchools.org relates how Australia's Northern Territory has just completed an installation of state- wide network infrastructure in all schools that is based on Linux LAN servers and makes wide use of open source software. I was very impressed with their accomplishment. They use SquirrelMail (PHP) for the mail, and the network infrastructure is Linux. The desktops are all Win 98 but they do include StarOffice as the productivity app so would save some more cash there.

My experience over the last 3 months of OpenSourceSchools.org is that while a complete takeover of Linux in schools is unlikely, there are many places where costly licensing can be replaces with OS equivalents to great savings.

link to several case studies

[einreb]

several case studdies

Open Source In Schools NOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

This movement is gaining ground. Here's a ton of sites:

Start with Why Use Open Source Software In Schools to answer your (and your superior's!) questions. Note that Microsoft is trying to keep a stranglehold on this and their salesmen are playing dirty; but we as free software activists have one thing they can not have: integrity. Teach the truth about Open Source, explain that this is the true American way, show how we need to use it in education to teach kids the right way to do things (and to share with neighbors) to make a productive world, and we'll go at it. Academia can't afford to lose itself in proprietary software; as this site explains, with free software we've got a chance for a blossoming in academia.

The K12 Linux in Schools Project

A good example is St. John's School in the UK (attention, USA education boards!)

Open Source and Education tells you how to do it, what you need to know.

Linux in Higher Education: Open Source, Open Minds, Social Justice is an important article in Linux Journal about this.

K12 Linux Terminal Server Project for Schools is just one of the things you can do.

K-12 Linux, another good site about this.

A good technical primer on Linux in Education

If you use free software in schools you will also need free documentation and training materials. Here is a list of the best of it.

(Pls mod this up guys, I'm posting anon...)

Free software + education == BAD IDEA!

[SumDeusExMachina]

I think I could speak for many people when I say that using Linux along with other free tools like gcc is one of the best things that a developer can do. I personally use RedHat at my job as a developer, along with the whole development team, while most of the rest of the company uses Windows. You just get more done in Linux if you're programming.

However, I think it would be wrong to try to foist Free Software upon unwitting schools before they knew what they were getting into. There is a very important reason that Linux has stayed at about .25% of desktop market share: it makes a crappy end-user desktop. Sure, you can use it on your network servers for Samba and mail and the like, but I would hesitate to train children on a system that will be ultimately useless to them when they get out into a world dominated by Microsoft software. Because, like it or not, high school is, for most, valuable job training before they leave high school and enter the work force, be that as secretaries using MS Office or accountants using Excel, etc. When you teach them to use software that is completely irrelevant outside of school, you are crippling them for life as they have to retrain themselves on all the applications that school had taught them in order to use something as commonplace as Office.

Not to mention the numerous administration headaches that would result from your everyday highschool computer teacher trying to figure out Linux, let alone teach it. I personally could not imagine my glorified typing teacher in high school comprehending file permissions, much less understanding something as arcane as TeX or vi.

All in all, its probably a better idea to stick with something like Macs which have a proven track record in education as well as most of the common office applications that can be found on Windows computers as well. Free Software has its place, but it certainly isn't on the desktop.

Re:Free software + education == BAD IDEA!

[pubjames]

When you teach them to use software that is completely irrelevant outside of school, you are crippling them for life

Don't you think this is a tad, erm, extreme? You think that using StarOffice (or whatever) instead of MS Office is going to mean that they are going to have big problems when they start work? Is MS Word really that different to be "completely irrelevant".

Anyway, school is about learning, not training, at least not where I come from. If an employer is unwilling to send new young recruits on a course to learn MS Office (if that's what they use) then they will have badly trained staff - the employers fault, not the schools.

Re:Free software + education == BAD IDEA!

[Chuck Messenger]

When you teach them to use software that is completely irrelevant outside of school, you are crippling them for life as they have to retrain themselves on all the applications that school had taught them in order to use something as commonplace as Office.

Crippling them for life? By teaching them something? Kids are smarter than you give them credit for. So are adults.

What kids need to learn about computers is not what keystroke combination does what in Application X. Teach them the principles of computer operation.

Open source, in my opinion, is of immense use in education, precisely because it is open. Students can not only learn to use apps, but can delve as far into the system as their curiosity takes them.

Schools should not be vocational training centers (for the most part). I mean, sure, there could be a Microsoft Office class, to learn how to use that software suite. That would be a vocational class, and it could have its place. But it shouldn't be the focus. Schools should not be fundamentally vocational.

Re:Free software + education == BAD IDEA!

[RedRun]

Because, like it or not, high school is, for most, valuable job training before they leave high school and enter the work force, be that as secretaries using MS Office or accountants using Excel, etc.

How horribly untrue. For many, if not most, high school is a path to college. We shouldn't be teaching kids the ins and outs of whatever is the hot topic of today, because that can change quickly. When I started high school (1992), we were still using DOS. Not terribly valuable today. We should be teaching them how to learn. This would involve exposing them to as many computer interfaces as possible (Win, Mac, Linux), so that they learn the basin functionality of an interface and can learn a new interface relatively quickly. By limiting them to one single interface style, they have trouble understanding the difference between the operating system, the interface to that system, and the software that runs on it. Not to mention the numerous administration headaches that would result from your everyday highschool computer teacher trying to figure out Linux, let alone teach it. I personally could not imagine my glorified typing teacher in high school comprehending file permissions, much less understanding something as arcane as TeX or vi.

There's no reason a teacher would have to use TeX or vi. StarOffice would do quite nicely as a word processor/spreadsheet combo. It has all the functionality a school could want. All in all, its probably a better idea to stick with something like Macs which have a proven track record in education as well as most of the common office applications that can be found on Windows computers as well.

It's that kind of attitude that keeps our schools impoverished and our kids learning-impaired. If we showed them three different word processors, they would realize that they all do pretty much the same thing. Suddenly, they learn that change isn't scary. They learn how to adapt, and become more dynamic students. They learn that computers are just machines that follow instructions, and can be changed to suite the user's need. Those skills are way more important than knowing how to set a page break in Word XP.

Re:Free software + education == BAD IDEA!

[Cybersiren]

Oh dear.

I learned to use a word processor on a very strange old Amstrad. Then I worked on macs for a while. Then I had to switch to Windows when I went off to university.

Now, I am comfortable using basic office software at an intermediate/expert level under mac, windows, linux, and am confident that I could learn to use basic office software under any given OS.

Teaching to one set of office software is pointless. Eventually it will be outmoded, whatever it is. Teach kids to be comfortable with computers, and comfortable teaching themselves to use new software. It'll do them much more good than harm in the long term.

Re:Free software + education == BAD IDEA!

[Unknown Lamer]

People use what they know and are taught what is in the marketplace.

So, if you teach people Free Software, they will use Free Software. And when they use Free Software, their kids will be taught Free Software. Or, you can continue the vicous cycle where you learn MS Office because that is what is used in the world, and because you know it you use it, and because that is what is used in the world your kids learn it...

Re:Free software + education == BAD IDEA!

[cavemanf16]

Unfortunately, most kids figure out fast that the 'educational' equipment in school is NOT what they want to use outside of their school life.

Which is exactly why the original thread about how MS Windows was so great for education was so off base. Is it the easiest to use? Yes. Does it have the most applications and games available for it? Yes. But all of this doesn't mean that you shouldn't use Linux in the classroom. The cost savings are what really matter here. Linux is free, as are many programs for it. Windows and Mac OS X, are not. Period.

If the kids don't like Linux, then fine, they can use WindowsXP at home on their own. My private school had Mac's and Apple IIG's back in the day too, but I didn't like them. So what, I still learned some simple computer operations on them, and used the budding new Windows PC at home. The tools will not make or break the students, the student's willingness to learn will make or break the student. Therefore, for your school's (and most importantly, teacher's) sake, why not save some money on the tools and use a free tool like Linux? No one NEEDS a $200 government-priced hammer, after all.

Re:Free software + education == BAD IDEA!

[SoftwareJanitor]

Because, like it or not, high school is, for most, valuable job training before they leave high school and enter the work force

Actually I don't believe that is true. I think that most high school graduates go on to attend some form of college. I don't think that a very large percentage of kids learn enough in just high school to get a good enough job that they would be using a computer much. If you only have a high school diploma you are probably going to be stuck flipping burgers, hammering nails on a construction site or bagging groceries rather than working in an office.

And as for children learning one software package and it having no applicability to the "real world" unless it is the exact package that they will encounter later -- I don't buy it. There isn't that much difference between one GUI word processor and another or one GUI spreadsheet and another. Or for that matter one desktop environment and another. Just about all of them have some kind of pop up application "start" menu, and icons on the desktop you can click. Just about all applications have a menu bar, tool bar, etc. If you know one, you can figure out anything else in a short period of time.

As for your assertation that Linux makes a crappy end-user desktop, I think it is largely a myth based on people being told that and not really taking the time to look for themselves. While your typing teacher may not be able to figure out a command line or power user tools like TeX and vi, she probably wouldn't have much more trouble figuring out how to use KFM/Konqueror and StarOffice than Windows Exployer/IE and Microsoft Office.

As someone who uses a KDE desktop on a daily basis, I just can't agree with you about free software not having its place on the desktop. Even some of my Windows using coworkers are using StarOffice instead of Microsoft Office because there is no reason to spend a lot of money on something they don't use all that much.

Re:Free software + education == BAD IDEA!

[DrCode]

By your reasoning, I'm only qualified to work in jobs that require a sliderule.

Re:Free software + education == BAD IDEA!

[Trekologer]

Because, like it or not, high school is, for most, valuable job training before they leave high school and enter the work force, be that as secretaries using MS Office or accountants using Excel, etc. When you teach them to use software that is completely irrelevant outside of school, you are crippling them for life as they have to retrain themselves on all the applications that school had taught them in order to use something as commonplace as Office.

Would any lessons learned on Office 97 become irrelivant when Office 2000 came out (and the same for XP)? Microsoft reworks the interface with every new version. Does someone taught on a new version need to be retaught?

Of course not. If the students are taught properly, then they should be able to go from one version to another, one program to another. A word processor is a word processor, regardless of the platform or package.

As Linux matures and administration becomes less complex, the savings of not having to buy licences to Microsoft software becomes clear.

A little side note here... The reason Microsoft wanted to "settle" with the government by giving away software to schools is to prevent this from occuring. They'd put themsleves on a level playing field with Linux by taking cost out of the equation.

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

Re:StarOffice is being used!

[Jason Earl]

Microsoft shouldn't be worried about Linux, it should be worried about StarOffice. After all, people get the operating system "for free" and Linux still doesn't have the wealth of software available for it that Windows has.

MS Office, on the other hand, is always an added expense, and it's expensive to boot. With the price of computers falling like a brick it won't be too long before the added cost of Microsoft Office doubles the price of a computer. Not only that, but there are probably more folks running Linux than folks that use a feature in MS Office that doesn't exist in StarOffice. In other words, the group of people that absolutely have to have MS Office is relatively small.

If the Office Suite were to become a commodity market Microsoft would be in a world of hurt (which is almost certainly why Sun is funding the effort).

Re:StarOffice is being used!

[mgkimsal2]

With the price of computers falling like a brick it won't be too long before the added cost of Microsoft Office doubles the price of a computer.

It already does, for low end stuff. I put together a low end system for about $500. Drive, motherboard, processor, RAM, case, etc. To install a retail copy of Win2k and Office XP (no upgrades, just fresh) is

Office XP - standard (not professional) $479 US
Windows 2000 professional - $319 US.

Yes, I'm sure there are stores with cheaper prices. Even if you got them both together for $500, that's STILL doubling the price of the system. Pricing of this stuff for average Joe Consumer is all based on them "upgrading". People just starting out, who don't/can't pirate but want all the MS goodies are in for sticker shock, imo.

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.

Re:Although...

[DrEldarion]

This is EXACTLY what I was thinking. The whole point of putting computers in schools is to get kids aquainted with them and for them to get to know how to work them.

If the computers in a certain school run Linux, what happens to those kids when they go on to higher schooling or get a job somewhere? It's quite likely they won't run Linux there, and many kids will have no clue what to do.

It seems that with the state of things right now, it'll just cause more harm than good.

-- Dr. Eldarion --

Re:Although...

[The Cat]

Anyone who can "only" operate a Linux workstation or server will have no trouble clicking icons and typing Word documents.

Now, someone who can only operate Windows presented with

$

..THAT'S a problem.

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!

[Junta]

So, if I understand you right, you are saying that it is better that they do everything by hand than to use a word processing application that will be outdated by the time they use it? I think the pen and paper approach is more archaic and a waste of time. Besides, the applications used by high schoolers are a lot more mature than they were in the days of Wordperfect 5.1 for Dos. The office apps of 95 don't look drastically different from today, for example.
High school provides more than reading, writing, and arithmetic, at least beyond grade school.

Even in grade school, "edutainment" software is a very good tool to instruct children. Besides, I think you underestimate how far high school went for you. In my Senior year I was admining a network of Sun4 systems running SunOS 4.1.3 for the school. Don't think that can be done on pen and paper... Granted, this was a very different high school than normal...

In normal high schools, there are some curriculums that include at least rudimentary programming. In most other classes, as well as in libraries, computers serve as a good research tool. Also, even for something like learning typing, a computer keyboard is a lot different than, say a typewriter.

Computers have become such a ubiqitous thing in our lives that it would be insane to say the kids have no business having them in school. Yes, applications change over time, but with current versions widely used and understood, companies shy away from the idea of changing interfaces drastically anymore for fear of losing consumer loyalty.

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.

Re:Wrong question!

[gmhowell]

Unfortunately, we largely pay teachers to babysit. (Note: wife is a former teacher.)

With various standardized tests and curricula, there is little room for teachers to go beyond the text. There is little time for human interaction.

In a perfect world, teachers would be paid to teach. Supposedly they are; in reality, they are paid to read from the state mandated (and now federally mandated) instruction book.

Re:Wrong question!

[GMontag451]

Disclaimer: All three of my parents (father, mother, and stepmother), as well as two of my grandparents, have been teachers. So you might say I am kind of biased.

For $30,000, you can get one teacher or 20 computers...do the math.

One teacher is worth infinitely more than 20 computers. COMPUTERS ARE NOT TEACHERS, period. And I find it sad that $30,000 can get you one teacher anyway, teachers are paid way too little.

As for your earthquake example, your science teacher could have done a simulation of that same process with a couple seismograph readings, and a class set of compasses and maps. This would have saved tons of money, or at least freed up the computer lab for some other class that actually needed it.

Re:Wrong question!

[aardvarkjoe]

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.

Um. We've had ways of teaching kids how to read that paces itself for much longer than computers have been around. It's called a library. You set the kid loose, and he finds something appropriate to his level.

Re:Wrong question!

[SIGFPE]

Computers are a force multiplier for teachers

Is that why the US has the highest standard of education in the world? Because it has the greatest number of computers in the home and schoolroom?

Re:Wrong question!

[johnnyb]

Actually, _programming_ is a skill that helps thinking. It helps you learn to break problems down into discrete manageable steps.

Re:Wrong question!

[The Cat]

For $30,000, you can get one teacher or 20 computers...do the math.

Or the administration can renovate the conference room in the elegantly appointed downtown offices.

Given these choices, I think that the newly-retired teacher will be starting a computer sales business while the administration decides between the walnut or mahogany paneling.

Re:Wrong question!

[johnnyb]

_Programming_ actually is kind of a universal. Learning to program a computer helps people understand many things about logic, sequence, and other stuff.

Re:Wrong question!

[MrResistor]

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.

I was reading at the 1st grade level when I started kindergarten, as were 90% of the kids that went to my preschool. Not because we were super genius kids, but because one middleaged woman named Norma decreed that all the kids would gather together for 5 minutes a day and sing the alphabet song twice; once the usual way and once phonetically (making the sounds rather than saying the names of the letters. Try it sometime. It sounds awkward and silly, which of course means kids love it) while following along on a big alphabet chart stapled to the wall. The younger kids picked it up from the older kids by hearing it everyday and could usually sing the whole thing in a couple of weeks. In the process they began to make the connections between the sounds they heard every day and the arcane symbols that make up our writen language, the first steps toward reading and writing. If we wanted to read and had trouble with a word, we asked for help, but that usually happened at home rather than at school. No computer necessary, easily repeatable in any school environment.

Please don't think I'm belittling your childs achievment. He's obviously doing very well with the tools he has available and the system he has been put in. But also don't think the computer is some magic cure to the ills of our educational system. Kids are ready to read at around 4 years old, the problem is that nobody's really trying to teach them.

Other than that I totally agree with you.

Re:Wrong question!

[crucini]

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

I agree, and I think the real answer is that there is little or no legitimate role for computers in class. I do think there should be ample computer labs for kids who wouldn't otherwise have access to computers to play around with. The bottom line is that schools are already doing a lousy job teaching the minimum knowledge that underpins civilization. People come out of high school pathetically ignorant, aliterate and unable to form a valid sentence. I don't see the point in taking up more of the school day with trendy computer stuff which kids can learn on their own time (I did.)

None of the good programmers I know had significant interaction with computers in school (excluding college). We learned on our own. It's far more important to know reading, writing and arithmetic.

I think an educated, alert teenager of 1901, if transported by time machine to our era, could easily learn how to use Microsoft Office. But his counterpart of today, if transported back to 1901, would have no hope of keeping up with the more intensive curriculum.

Re:Wrong question!

[dillon_rinker]

Um yourself. Perahsp you missed the point of my example? Or do you know some magical way by which libraries help kids who don't know what sound "k" makes? :)

Moving on to your point, though - pacing older kids. I'd assume that you, like I, learned a lot by reading books from libraries, and that the reading and fun of learning was motivation enough. News flash - not everyone is like you and me. How do you motivate someone to learn who does not have an intrinsic desire to learn? How do you reward them for learning? Computer games are a great way. There was once a little girl (about 9, I think) who created a Logo program to make a very complicated geometric figure. It took her a while to make it look just the way she wanted. A visitor asked her what she thought of math class. "I hate math," she replied, while the turtle went through its geometric gyrations. She thought she was playing with an immense toy; she had no idea that she was learning "math" - but she was.

Re:Wrong question!

[dillon_rinker]

Yup. (More bragging ahead). I had my son adding at three, and I'd started to teach him phonics when I re-evaluated what I was doing. I don't believe that you learn everything you need to know in school; they teach you reading, writing, arithmetic, and some other stuff, but there are other important things to learn. I decided to concentrate on those other things. I did not want him to be too far ahead of other students and get bored; I had that problem. School was easy for me, and thus it was not good preparation for life, which is not easy. I decided that it would be easy enough for him anyway without my adding to his problems.

On the other hand, if we'd decided

But also don't think the computer is some magic cure to the ills of our educational system
Correct. However, let me take an analogy from carpentry. Circular saws don't build houses. Pneumatic nailers do not build houses. They make it much easier and faster to do so, though. Neither will make up for a stupid carpenter; in fact, they can make the final product worse.

Computers are a TOOL, a useful and powerful one. They are not a magic fixall and we should not put them in schools because we think they are. But neither should we remove them from schools, or prevent their deployment there, because we know they are not magic fixalls.

Re:Wrong question!

[dillon_rinker]

One teacher is worth infinitely more than 20 computers.
Yes. Let me suggest an analogy...one combat soldier costs about as much as 20 rifles and ammunition loads. But would you rather have 20 soldiers with rifles, ammo, and grenades, or 21 soldiers? Weapon systems force multipliers - they make your people more effective. I would suggest that the same is true of teachers and computers.

COMPUTERS ARE NOT TEACHERS, period.
They are also not typists, but they make typists more effective. They are not accountants, but they make accountants more effective. They are not lawyers, but they make lawyers more effective. They are not network administrators, but they make the admins more effective (ever pore through a stack of hardcopy logs? Ever do a search for a single IP address?)You see my point?

My point was not that computers could replace teachers (they can't), but that they were a cost-effective method of augmenting existing teachers. A teacher with several computers can accomplish more than a teacher alone. 1 teacher + 4 computers = 5 threads of instruction. You couldn't get a teachers aide for the cost of 4 computers (amortize over three years).

teachers are paid way too little
No offense, but I disagree. I believe that most teachers are paid...exactly what they're worth. I observed very little excellence in the teachers I've taught with (I did mention I'm a former teacher, right?) Many taught because they got summers off, or they weren't good enough to do anything else, or they didn't have the ambition or imagination to do anything else - the only careers they saw growing up were teaching and whatever their parents did. Of course, many teach for love of the students and the subject; sadly, these are a minority. I left teaching and am making more now, five years later, than I ever could have as a teacher - and I would have needed three more years of school and 25 years of experience to max out the pay scale and come close to what I'm making now. I think if pay scales were higher, the schools would be able to weed out the poor-quality teachers and retain better ones. I don't include myself in the latter category, BTW; I was a lousy teacher - I had no classroom control (ie discipline) skills and didn't want to make a go of it after the first year.

As for your earthquake example...I'd estimate that it'd take an entire class period to do one or two simulations. We spent half an hour on it and did about six. We had the seismograph readings on screen. We had to measure the different types of waves, determine when they arrived, and calculate the distance from that station to the epicenter. We didn't need manual dexterity; the computer did the plotting. We didn't need good arithmetic skills; the computer did the calculations (there are pros and cons to this, I'll grant, but it can be useful to permit the person who is lousy at math to be successful at something else; success at science can lead to a love of science which can lead to motivation to learn the math that science requires, while frustration in math AND science produces nothing). We were able to focus on the objective: studying how seismologists pinpoint earthquakes. Furthermore, the computer was able to generate a unique problem for each student, so it was impossible to copy off of someone else; this had the side benefit that no one was pressured to give someone else the answer. Overall, I'd have to conclude that it was an effective use of the technology, and it was better than the low-tech way of doing it. You really should trust my opinion on this, because I was there and you weren't.

Re:Wrong question!

[dillon_rinker]

I learned to read in kindergarten too...without computers.
Me too. Hmm...if what's in the past will work now, too, why stop at 20 years ago, with no computers? 200 years ago, no pencils, no pens, no erasers, no slates. Not too many books teaching five-year-olds to read, for that matter. 2000 years ago, not much of anything. Not too many were literate, in fact, yet society seemed to function just fine (we're still here, right? descended from people who lived then?)

So, if I understand you correctly, you don't want anything better for your children than what you had? You think that children can learn nothing from computers? You think that a computer can't present EXACTLY the same material as a teacher? You think a computer can't present questions for a pupil to answer, then adjust future material presentation based on responses? You, sir, are completely ignorant and I will respond no further.

Re:Wrong question!

[MrResistor]

Correct. However, let me take an analogy from carpentry. Circular saws don't build houses. Pneumatic nailers do not build houses. They make it much easier and faster to do so, though. Neither will make up for a stupid carpenter; in fact, they can make the final product worse.

I love this analogy, because I worked in construction for several years. I knew a few carpenters that kept small chainsaws in their trucks. Certainly, a chainsaw is useful and powerful tool if you happen to be cutting wood, but is it the right tool? If you're bucking firewood, it's certainly the tool of choice. If you're framing, it may be acceptable in certain circumstances. For finish work, you should be shot for merely looking at it.

Personally, I think that in many educational situations computers can do more harm than good, precisely because they're such powerful tools.

You really have to think about what's best for the child. To learn to spell, or to learn how to use a spellchecker? To learn to add, or to learn what buttons to push on a calculator? I am constantly seeing (through my 11 year old brother) schools making the wrong choice, falling victim to the public excitement for technology.

We need to take a step back and really think about the place of technology in our education system, think about how it's being deployed and why, and weigh the costs against the benefits. When I was a math tutor in college I saw far too many students, most claiming A's in math through high school, who couldn't do basic operations like multiplying by 10s without pulling out a calculator to believe that this isn't a problem; and my english tutor collegues had constant complaints about students who were totally dependant on spelling and grammar checkers.

This really is a huge problem. Think about a carpenter who doesn't know how to use a handsaw, that's the kind of students our schools love-affair with technology is turning out. All most of these kids know is how to use the tools of today, and they lack the basic understanding they'll need to create the tools of tomorrow.

Computers certainly have a place in education, but that place is not everywhere.

Free?

[TeleoMan]

It took me a while to figure out what this article is talking about. When the author says "free software" what he means is _not_ the same free as the FSF. He actually means "getting commercial software for free" and not "free software like Linux." The problem with this whole thesis is that I just can't imagine that it's particularly true of Linux writers, because the amount of money you save by getting a free copy of RedHat or Mandrake is pretty trivial, since you can just download them for free off the net.

However, in the world of non-free software, where "review copies" of software can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, it gets a lot more tricky. I have had plenty of personal experience with people (myself included!) who want to write reviews of product X in order to get a free copy. And that can definitely influence what you write...



"I'm not joking. I'm really running for President." - Pat Robertson

Keep dreaming.

[mister_sparkle]

The sad fact is that there are _no_ open source alternatives that provide the wealth of features that Microsoft Office does. I have been using office XP, and you have to admit that it is pretty nice. Open source alternatives are so far behind that I really don't see them catching up. Besides, the rest of the business world has standardized upon MS Office. That is the de facto file format, and I don't see it changing anytime soon. Office XP on Win2000 is stable and packed with features. I think people just need to accept that software costs money, instead of looking for a free lunch.

You wouldn't expect your teachers to work for free, but you expect highly skilled software developers to give their work away. Think again, my friend.

Re:Keep dreaming.

[mister_sparkle]

Gee, you're right, high school kids sure don't need to learn to use office productivity suites! I mean, it's not like they will ever be expected to, say, type up a document, or come up with a spreadsheet. And do you think the office they work in is going to have Gnumeric/Evolution, or Outlook/Excel? Hmm, I wonder.

Take a hint from Ximian's frontman, Miguel. He's not a glaringly anti-Microsoft person. At least he's honest enough to admit that they've done some things right. I mean, Evolution is a blatant Outlook clone, people. Sheesh.

Re:Keep dreaming.

[SoftwareJanitor]

How many people need the "wealth of features" of Microsoft Office? I can't ever get anyone to tell me what it has that StarOffice doesn't. For that matter, from what I see 90% of Windows and MS-Office users use only about 10% of those features. Not always the same 10%, but there are a lot of those features that just about nobody uses. How many of them would be happy with something that was smaller, cheaper and faster? I've been using StarOffice for quite a while, and I have to say, it has always done what I wanted. If anything the complaint I had about the 5.x versions was that it was too much like MS-Office in that it was big, used a lot of resources and was slow. 6.0 has made a lot of improvements on that in that it seems much faster, especially on startup. StarOffice hasn't failed to open up the MS Office format documents people send me (unlike some of my co-workers who were using MS Office 95 and couldn't open some documents created in newer versions of MS Office -- they've since switched to StarOffice), so I just don't see the point in paying money for Microsoft Office.

As for MS-Office being the standard file formats, that is true for now, but unless you've got some kind of crystal ball, it is dangerous to make a prediction on that not changing in the future. If you went back 10 years, and told people that Word Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3 wouldn't be the standard file formats in a couple of years, people would have looked at you with the same kind of disbelief that you do now regarding MS-Office. If you went back 10 years further it was WordStar and VisiCalc. Things change, and few people will accurately predict the way things will be in the future, especially not those without a view of the past.

Do I have a problem paying for software? No, if it is worth it. Am I going to pay for something I can get free? Probably not. And I certainly don't want to pay money for software that isn't worth it. And frankly, that is what I think about most of Microsoft's products, especially since it seems like their prices have gone up over the years.

Do I expect highly skilled software developers to give their work away? No, at least not unless they want to. But do they? Yes, and I thank them for that.

Re:Keep dreaming.

[gimpboy]

i think you proved your own point. ximian poduces software which they give away freely and make their money selling services-much like redhat does. by giving away software they can attain a large userbase, at the same time they can sell services to those that require it. this enables them to provide free software and make money.

Re:Keep dreaming.

[mister_sparkle]

Yeah, and the money sure is rolling in for Ximian, isn't it! The whole "selling services and giving away software" thing has worked so well for people like SuSE (layoffs), Caldera, Ximian, LinuxCare (dead), Easel (dead), etc. It's a stellar business model! And free software that provides services is always undermined by some free software project that offers the same services for free. Why pay for Ximian Update when apt-get does the same thing for free? And don't tell me that "newbie users" would pay for it, because they aren't exactly running like mad to dump Windows for Linux. And for that matter, Windows provides updates for free. I still fail to see the difference between selling software and selling services. Selling software makes Microsoft evil, but selling services is OK. Of course, these are the same people who scream bloody murder when they hear about .NET and the idea of Microsoft selling services. Sigh.

Re:Keep dreaming.

[gimpboy]

i did not mean to suggest that selling software is evil. if i gave that impression then i apologize. ximian just recently began to sell sell their services, so i think they should have their chance at failure.

the current state of the economy is thinning up the ranks a bit in many areas, open source software companies are not excluded. business models derived from open source software are in heavy evolution by the very nature of their newness. this is bound to result in a fair number of failures.

people new to linux are more likely to purchase boxed versions of redhat and are also more likely to look into support. i dont believe companies are looking to them for all of their revenue. i believe the corporate market is a more practicle source of revenue. for example, look at the support contracts between redhat and ibm.

microsoft is evil in my opinion, but not because they sell software. i believe they are evil because they are monopolistic, and anticompetative. evidently there are alot of people who believe this. this is one of the many reasons people turn to opensource software.

when your business is so successful at stomping out the competition, that your main competitor has gained its place because it is available for free-this is a good indicator that you are a monopoly.

i've used both windows and unix (solaris, irix, linux, etc). for me the unix paradigm is prefered. granted i quite using windows over 2 years ago, after the fourth install of windows nt in the same day, died. i plugged in my roommates redhat 5.2 cd and never turned back.

i would be lying to say that i have never had problems with linux. the community that surrounds linux is one of it strongest points and weakest. the zealotry can be a big turnoff, but a wilingness to help new users is a big turnon.

if this zealotry has effected you negatively, then i am sorry and would encourage you to look past that at a community who are more than willing to help.

Kabul elementary

[junis from afghanist]

I just wanted to let you know that Kabul Elementary school, which operates out of my neighbor Mustaffa's barn, has been running the new version of ISLAMIX. ISLAMIX is a revolutionary open-source operating system which Mustaffa and I developed recently for our Commodore computers. The kids at Kabul Elementary think ISLAMIX is the greatest thing since sliced camel! We will have a website soon with more information about ISLAMIX and it's many features (including Beowolf clustering in order to download and play movies from the Internet.) We are also working on porting the Katzbot to ISLAMIX, but we've not had any luck getting things to compile. It seems that our copy of endlessramblings.h may have been corrupted during the modem transfer. -Junis from Afghanistan

h3llz y3ah! phr33 s0ftwar3 sav3d my sk00l!

[Wakko Warner]

We were gonna have to shell out MAD DOLLARS ($$$) for windows XP until me and my friends found a L33T 0-DAY KRAK for it on IRC!!!

Now the entire library network is running XP Server!!!

Free software r0x0rs!!!

- A.P.

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:our high school uses apache

[Anonymous Coward]

>>Most of the work for the attendance program was done by one of my students who was learning perl on the fly.

How much you want to bet that this kid just happens to graduate school with perfect attendance?

Re:our high school uses apache

[geekoid]

I think it would be really usefull if you could write down what you did, the benefits to the school, some stories about how the non-MS system sttyed running when the MS system went down.
Include the totla cast savinges from licensing, to paper savings. Get some of the teachers to write a couple of paragraphs on what they think of the syste.
Then send a copy to every school, teacher, and linux group you can. I would send a nice Hardcopy to the schools a teachers, and a link to a soft copy for the Linux group.
Yes, I know its a lot of effort, but I think this is an important issue for the Nation, not just to the linux community. The cost saving and educational opportunities are huge for tax payers.

Re:our high school uses apache

[laserjet]

I did pretty much the same thing as you guys state, and I didn't abuse it much. The thing is, I may have abused it a couple of times, but I sure did learn a lot. And that is what is important.

Re:our high school uses apache

[laserjet]

Excellent quote. Mind if I steal it for my sig one of these days?

Re:our high school uses apache

[sheetsda]

How much you wanna bet he HAD perfect attendance. I am that student.

SEUL.Org

[0A4h]

It seems nobody has mentioned www.seul.org, the section education. There is a lot of software and some (for you valuable) testimonies.

I must protest...

[WheelDweller]

I keep hearing about how Windows is so easy to use, but moments ago I showed someone (Again!) how to drag and drop a file. She's be at this job since before 1995 when the computers were installed; some people you're never gonna reach.

But I'm not seeing an old Slackware, install-by-tarballs machine running a monochrome
monitor being installed into school desktops; anyone trying that should be shot, and allowed to admin windows for a living.

I use Redhat and Ximian here. I don't have time to put on my programmer-hat every time I install something, and the RPMs cover my ass so I don't crash libraries or something, and keep in mind I can install them from the comfort of my own desk instead of walking the halls to get to the Windows box.

And Ximian is a big help, too; their latest offerings are at least as good as Microsoft for the things that matter (Spreadsheets, Word Processing, etc) and get better every month. If you haven't tried them, now's the time to start watching; they've done a superb job.

And as for learning....how'd these people ever migrate off of WfW? And then to Win98...then to 2000? It's not the exact same thing, and that's rather the *point* isn't it?

Corbett School in Tucson

[r_j_prahad]

OSEF has a great article from a feature story the Arizona Daily Star ran on them. URL below, but here's some quickie quotes from the story....

"As such, they're entirely unimpressed that Corbett is among a mere handful of primary schools around the world with a computer network that runs Linux, the flagship of the fashionable free software movement. They probably can't appreciate the amount of money the school is saving, or the thousands of hours that Linux devotee Harry McGregor has donated to transform a collection of PCs past their prime into a Net-connected laboratory that's ahead of its time."

"A lab similar to Corbett's could cost the district $100,000 or more if it were set up with new computers and commercial software. Instead, the school spent just $12,000 to convert its donated PCs into a Linux network that offers similar access to the Net and educational programs. Moreover, Corbett's pupils will gain experience with an operating system that's becoming more popular every day."

http://www.osef.orgarticles_and_letters/azstar/whi zkids.html

My experiences

[James1006]

My school district currently uses a mixed Microsoft/Linux environment. Until last week, our primary www server was Linux. However my boss got grumpy and decided to switch it to Win2k+IIS w/FP Extensions, so that he could update it easier via Frontpage (I'm gagging too). However, within 30 minutes of him installing Win2k and IIS, it got Nimdaed. Nice job! Right now, we have: A secondary Linux www server, for PHP/MySQL things. A SMTP/IMAP/webmail server in Linux. This is one area where Linux paid off. MS wanted thousands for Exchange, Win2k with the necessary hardware. Old machine (We don't have a ton of users) + Linux + exim + uwimap + Apache/PHP/MySQL = total new costs of $0. We are also implementing a Linux firewall to segment the network into DMZs (Something thats never been done, because as with most projects it is "Lets get it done and up as fast as possible". sigh.)

Re:Schools should switch to Linux, NOT BSD.

[tshoppa]

While *BSD may be appropriate for weekend hackers and tinkerers, it is entirely inappropriate for any school computing solutions...

Dude, you *do* know that the "B" in "BSD" is a rather famous public school?

Programming

[finity]

My high school offers programming classes, but we do all our programming on windows machines. I don't know why we don't switch over to linux and GNU, it being free and all. It seems like it would all be a better learning experience if we could easily see the source for more complex programs. My friends and I have setup a Slackware box, but the school system doesn't know yet and we don't plan to tell them. Last time we did, the next day we came to school and the power cord, monitor, keyboard, mouse and network cords were all gone. They thought it was a "virus" ;-)

My story

[Anonymous Coward]

I was involved in a project to donate computers to a middile school in the mountains.

We had computers donated from Goodwill and managed to get our university microsoft rep to donate Windows.

Or first thought was to use Linux, but the schools ruled it out since none of the teachers
would have been able to use it.

We did manage to get them Office 2000, though, and
I thank the people at Microsoft that helped us with that.

Moral of the story though -- many schools are too afraid to learn new things, and that prevents free (and often better) software from taking hold.

Linux developers do need to develop a more integrated desktop. Should there be a "X-with-training-wheels" we'd see a lot more Linux users!

Re:My story

[johnnyb]

It's really sad when the _schools_ are afraid to learn new things.

Political reality

[Mr. Fred Smoothie]

Besides which, in any school you can find technologically savvy kids. Make them a part of the computer team that maintains the network.

In this age of lawsuit-happy parents and grandstanding local politicians, I don't see many school board members or superintendants who'd likely wan't to be associated with the idea of kids controlling their own use of technology, however flawed the idea of controlling access to technology in schools may be.

Re:Political reality

[Unknown Lamer]

I am part of the back room "bench tech" team at my high school. It is part of the tech research class. We set up new machines when they come in, service broken ones, and install new software while we aren't working on our research projects. The only thing we aren't allowed to do is open the cases, the county techs have to do that. Of course, I don't do much work because Windows and the Mac OS confuse the hell out of me. I am so used to just popping in, editing a text file, and reloading a daemon that pressing graphical buttons (the fun part is finding the buttons you need to click) and rebooting five or six times before it works is impossible. The other people (that actually use Windows at home) do a lot of "bench teching" though.

Re:Political reality

[sirket]

Considering the plight of public schools in America, and the wonderful job that our politicians have done with the issue, it is the responsiblity of students, parents, and the school itself to solve the problem.

In my high school, the computer network was run by the students. Contrary to what some people thought, when these students were given the power to abuse the network, they reacted in exactly the opposite way. They became very responsible. They took their position seriously and did not abuse it. Perhaps it is time we stopped treating high school students like children.

The school administration accepted the situation because it was the only way they got working computers and an Internet connection. The parents accepted it because it resulted in a better environment for their children.

Some safeguards were put in place, such as no students were allowed to work on the file server. This was to help prevent any students from reading other students email and files, but it was more of a token gesture than real security because real security would have stopped things from getting done.

-sirket

riverdale school

[McVeigh]

www.riverdale.k12.or.us/linux/ good linux info there also

It could be a really good thing . . . .

[actappan]

My father teaches CS at a small private school, and while they're not by any means struggling financially - they are somewhat apprehensive about Microsoft's new fervor for license enforcement.

They're seriously considering a move from their current student lab environment (Win 9x with Novell Netware) to a Linux thin client environment - what would basically be X terms. This has huge resource allocation advantages and because it's open source - the licensing restrictions are few if any.

This could literally save them millions over the next few years (The hardware life cycle for thin clients is considerable longer, and new server hardware, while expensive, is cheaper than buying several hundred new desktops every few years - not to mention say $100 dollars per system savings against XP Pro licenses)

That millions could keep them afloat in thin times, or could mean that they can provide scholarships to needy students.

See related: K12 Linux Project

Also in belize.

[Malcontent]

see here

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.

It's had a huge impact

[Nelson]

I doubt that you could find a case of a school keeping it's doors open when it otherwise would have closed because of free software. Personally, I would hope that a school would stop using computers before it stopped teaching, but that's just my opinion.

Realistically though, free software has made a huge impact. I think the most obvious exmaple to me is the use of GCC in college classes. Hundreds of colleges use it that otherwise might not be able to teach courses behind computers. (note: you don't need a computer to teach C or C++ or to learn it, plenty of people have done it that way, I think it's a bit more enjoyable with a computer though) Compilers on multiuser UNIX systems are traditionally very expensive, as are site licenses to compilers under Windows.

I also think that there is a behind the scenes factor that has always been very hard to measure with linux. I know that my old school district, Boulder Valley Public Schools, has several Linux machines in various capacities. A couple are used as lan servers in some schools, a couple are used as firewalls and proxys and email and web servers. I'm certain that some act as bridges and routers. That's stuff that makes their life easier, serves a purpose and it's really hard to measure. Off the shelf firewalls can cost thousands of dollars. I have no idea how much it costs to buy the hardware, software and then hire someone to build you an exchange server for email or setup an email server with something non-linux.

As for teaching software and that kind of thing, I think it's still in the infancy.

Depends on the level of the student

[Mr. Fred Smoothie]

They teach auto shop in high school. Of course, fixing cars is not as "essential" as reading, writing and math, either. However, not *all* students will go on to college. Most will probably own a car at some point. For some, getting a job fixing cars out of high school may be an attractive option. So knowing how to do simple repairs on a car is a very *practical* thing for *many* high school students to learn, and I think that a lot of people would argue that therefore it's a valuable addition to the curriculum.

Many kids will either own computers or work with them daily after high school. Some may want to go on to work in an explicitly computer-oriented career, which however doesn't require much specific post-secondary education (hardware repair in a small shop, for instance). To the same degree as auto-mechanics (and probably far more than say, wood shop), computer education in secondary schools is a valuable addition to the curriculum.

For primary education, heavily computer-centric instruction may be overkill. But at the high school level good arguments can be made for it.

Of course, it won't be too useful to students who just want their school to subsidize their bong-building activities, but that's what metal shop is for.

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.

Well, my son's grade school, for one...

[freebsd guy]

About two years ago, my son's grade school upgraded their computer lab and, as a concerned parent, I was on the advisory committee for that. Originally they had planned to do an all-NT installation for security and usability reasons, but we did a cost-benefit analysis and found that the licensing would have cost us an arm and a leg.

So, we arrived at a compromise: although I wanted a straight FreeBSD shop, we settled for Linux on the desktops and FreeBSD on the servers, provided that the Linux USB support and stability improved. We still use the 2.2 kernel series with backported USB support, and are running FreeBSD 4.0-STABLE on all of the servers (which, by the way, have not been rebooted since they were installed).

When the numbers came in, we found that we were able to afford 20 extra computer systems (!) by not paying the Microsoft tax. Also, we were able to hire a sysadmin very cheap who works remotely (he has been banned from the school grounds), and found in our analysis that we would have needed to pay about three times as much to get the MCSEs that it would have taken to keep an NT shop running smoothly.

So, the school board wins and the kids win with Open Source. That is the way it should be.

freebsd guy

Re:Well, my son's grade school, for one...

[Morgoth_Bauglir]

>> (he has been banned from the school grounds)

You can't just say that and not tell the story.

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/

Re:While free is good...

[Jason Earl]

Let's take a look at this point by point.

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.

What you really mean to say is that all of the teachers know how to log on and fire up Word. Most teachers don't really know anything about Windows administration. That's why the computers in most classrooms work poorly.

This simply means that whatever Linux front end was offered would have to be similar to Windows. It would have to be at least as similar as Windows XP is to Windows 95. For the simple things both KDE and Gnome can be set up so that the teachers wouldn't miss a beat.

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.

Once again. The teachers aren't teaching the students to use the OS. Most teachers don't even know that right clicking on objects gives them a different menu. Teachers are teaching students to "click on the Word icon" and then word process. If you created icons for the StarOffice programs you would be 90% of the way there.

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?

This is already a problem. Even if you have Windows. Many students who have computers don't have MS Office (it's expensive), and if they do have MS Office there is a good chance that they have an older version like Office 95 that won't open the newer formats (easily). With a switch to Linux the school could easily (and inexpensively) hand out copies of StarOffice for Windows or Linux (it's free).

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??

This, in my opinion, is the one legitimate point. However, the answer to this is to not roll out Linux PCs but instead to have one Linux server and a pile of thin-clients. That way all the local tech would have to do is throw out the old thin-client and plug in the new one. My guess is that the current Windows administrator could easily learn to be a fairly competent Linux admin if they didn't have to worry about all of the failed client PCs. He/She would have a whole lot more time on their hands with only one machine to administer.

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.

Anyone that can learn to use StarOffice will have no trouble using MS Office (and vice versa). These applications are nearly identical.

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

And that's precisely the information that is needed to sell schools on Free Software. Demonstrate to them how much easier it would be for them to administer one Linux server and a pile of disposable ThinkNics and you can bet that they will sit up and listen. At the very least public schools should be giving StarOffice a look. It would save them a bundle in licensing, and will even run on their existing Windows systems.

Re:While free is good...

[dR.fuZZo]

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?

That's nothing, sonny. Why, back in my day, we had Windows at home and Apples in the schools. We had to pay for everything, we couldn't work on the same document at home and at school then either, and we liked it!

Forgot the link...

[appleprophet]

It's kind of funny how SourceForge and NewsForge were linked to... But the site that I've never even HEARD of before was completely omitted.

SCHOOLFORGE

Making old system last longer...

[sterno]

In reading some of the case studies on this, it looks like the biggest use for Linux is in two realms:

1) Servers - file sharing, web servers, e-mail, etc
2) Making old machines useful again

A lot of schools have old 486's and Pentium lying around which are pretty much useless as a Windows desktop, but set these systems up as X-terminals and throw a sub $1000 server behind it, and suddenly they are rejuvenated. This also has the benefit of making the management of these systems much easier.

I know I've seen a number of initatives where some politician gets the bright idea that the secret to making schools better is to buy a lot of hardware. This usually helps for a little while, but then in 3 or 4 years the hardware becomes nearly useless and nobody's throwing more money at it. By going with Linux, it seems like they can extend the value of that initial investment a lot further and thus save hugely in the long run.

In a related news

[jsse]

Here in Hong Kong there's a similar project(in Chinese) like ' PCs for Kids'. At first I thought it's doomed, until I know Microsoft is involved.

Well Microsoft does not alway mean to charity - especially when a shiny Microsoft logo is behind it.

Since when is free software only in Linux

[Vicegrip]

Many GNU tools have been ported to many other OSes including MS Windows.
There are a host of free software applications available for many OSes including MS Windows.

This, not to mention that, Linux distributions have achieved the point where most previously 'complexe' administration tasks are now done inside friendly GUI applications.

GNU's Not Unix is an acronym with a meaning that seems sadly forgotten in some of these discussions.

I personally think that teaching teenagers why they should be concerned about their intellectual heritage and about free software an important proposition regardless of what OS they are running.

**volunteer**

[Erich]

I think that most of us that use linux on a regular basis know that given a good setup (reliable server with a bunch of diskless netboot clients, all running KDE or Gnome or whatever with SomethingOffice installed, and doing an autoRPM or apt-get upgrade every few days automatically, and a nice fast postscript laser printer) know that a good setup can require basically ZERO administration after setup (and not too hard to set up for someone who knows what she is doing).

The problem is that when someone in the education system goes to CompUSA or their local Mom and Pop computer store, they don't get someone who will set them up with that sort of thing.

So here is what you need to do: volunteer your time. Set up that computer network for your school, especially those of you with children in it.

You can also help the school with find good deals on businesses wanting to get rid of equipment ... those old PII 233's that they don't want to use anymore can be a big tax writeoff for them, and would work fine as a diskless workstation.

But the problem is that most school teachers don't have much of a clue in the realm of computers. They don't know how to make a dozen half-broken computers into a lab. So volunteer your time and help them get set up!

Re:**volunteer**

[gmhowell]

This is a good idea, but...

Not all pricipals, administrators, etc. are interested in volunteer work. I think it falls back on the old "who are you going to blame if it breaks" scenario. Some are also afraid that only pedophiles want to spend time in school. The best opportunity is if you are a parent, and volunteer or speak up at a PTA night. Unfortunately, most others are often screwed.

Good luck with it though.

Re:Jsut spend the money on MS.

[Chuck Milam]

"It's not like we could use the money for other stuff. Like paying teachers, for instance. Teachers are gonna do a lto more than computers can ever hope to, and if we pay them more, we might even be able to attract people who could be great teachers."

There is a reason teachers aren't paid very much, and it's not because we don't value education or the teaching profession. It's just simple economics. For the "warm fuzzy" of getting to work with kids, the personal satisfaction the job brings, etc., people are willing to take a lower salary for teaching than they would for jobs in other fields. Teaching also seems to attract a number of people who don't really need the money at all (wealthy families, spouses, whatever) and are therefore willing to work for less. At least in my area of the country, for every teacher who demands a pay raise, there are a number of people willing to take that teacher's position at the current pay rate or even less.

But, I digress. I absolutely agree with one of your points: A good teacher in the classroom is infinately more important than a computer in the classroom.

I don't know about save, but we use it extensively

[phoenix_rizzen]

Our district (K-12) uses open-source and free software fairly extensively. In the past year, we have:
-- moved all web and e-mail servers from NT to RedHat Linux 6.2
-- put in FreeBSD 4.x-based firewalls in all the high schools and admin buildings
-- replaced the IBM NetVista Proxy Server software running on NT with proxy servers running RH 6.2, Squid, DansGuardian, and the like
-- implemented a very successful pilot of the Linux Terminal Server Project thin-clients in two elementary school labs (one school only uses Windows on administration desktops)
-- promoted StarOffice 5.2 as an alternative to MS Office, on both Windows and Linux
-- most IT desktops run either FreeBSD, RH Linux, or both

Currently, all servers in the district run either FreeBSD, Linux, or NetWare. There are no NT servers left in the district.

Most computer labs run Windows 95/98, a couple 2000, and one or two are still running 3.1. Some are now running Linux, with more planned for next year.

The goal is to have all elementary school labs running Linux, all servers to be running FreeBSD or Linux, and all high school Internet access to be policed by Unix servers.

Working quite well for us. Saved $30,000 is licensing fees so far (that's for the IBM software), enough to hire another tech if needed. Should see greater savings as time goes on. Also were able to purchase 200+ lower-end PCs for the elem labs as opposed to just 30 high end machines -- that's close to 30 labs for the price of one -- as the elem labs will be running Unix.

The interesting thing here is that the teachers and principals are behind this 100%, and are clamoring to get their labs set up. It's too bad there are only 5 techs for 50+ schools. :(

One example (not k-12, but heck)

[dilger]

The Networked Writing Environment would probably exist without free (freedom or beer) software, but the applications available to students would be very limited. We have 150 seats in five classrooms, using thin clients (SunRays, NCDs, etc) with Solaris servers.

If we spent only $100 per seat on software, that would be $15K -- and I bet replacing StarOffice, The Gimp, our HTML editor, tkMOO-lite, exmh, Xplore, and other applications would cost a lot more than that. Not to mention that Solaris is free (beer) for educational use.

I'm sure there are also cost savings from using the client/server model instead of 150 workstations. We have two system administrators and one half-time graduate student, and a few hangers-on like me who poke stuff around when time allows. :)

The NWE has been around since 1995. With education budget cuts in Florida reaching into the hundreds of millions this year, and maybe more next year, I don't see the Solaris/free software setup being replaced with a non-free model anytime soon.

cbd

free software

[vicious_sloth]

DO college's count, becuase here at The Cooper union most of the stuff we run is Win95 and Red Hat Linux. Mostly becuase this school does not charge tution, does it see the value in running Free software like Linux. They've made it work rather well. and espcially since all the computers are at least 5 years old.

Re:It isn't just free software, it's freedom

[i_am_nitrogen]

Your argument, while sound, lacks a few key points of information:

1. How much does it cost to maintain a Windows network?
2. How much does it cost to maintain a Linux network?
3. How many kids are going to notice that you switched the color of the borders around the browser they use to check their e-mail when they should be working?

When I was in high school, my school had 6 or so labs of Windows 98 boxen. In especially the writing lab, during any given 90 minute class period there would be at least 5 or 6 BSOD's. There had to be a semi-admin in each room, plus one overworked guy over the whole school. I recall hearing numerous discussions about threats from the SPA to shut down the school's computers if they couldn't produce a license for each computer, etc. Viruses were a major problem as well. They had some insane security system set up using Novell Netware, and because Windows 9x is inherently r00ted the moment you install it, there are bound to be places they missed (and there were, trust me -- I know). There were many a day when my buddies and I would play Starcraft instead of work, simply because we could. In a Linux system, you need a third of the people, and they can administer each computer from a remote location. Most of the school's admin's time was spent running from one end of the maze-like structure to the other. Tools like ssh, and even basic UNIX security principles (with a more granular system such as SELinux even better) would've saved a lot of time and money. Even though a Linux admin costs more money usually, they need fewer of them.

Apache + FP extensions

[CaptainSuperBoy]

Why not use Apache with frontpage extensions? That way you get to use your PHP/mysql, and your boss gets to use Frontpage to update his pages.. everyone goes home happy.

Re:-1 clueless

[Syberghost]

Ok, I'll bite. How do YOU calculate it?

Teachers knowing file permissions

[mgkimsal2]

Perhaps teachers SHOULD know a bit more about file permissions. If they did, they'd have a much better understanding, which could be taught to the students, if often only by example. More people understanding file permissions (whether under Win or Lin or whatever) will generally be more knowledgeable about at least BASIC security issues, and will be more prepared to deal with viruses and worms in the future (which will surely never completely die).

Come see a 4th grade Linux Classroom right now...

[pnelson]

http://k12ltsp.org/classroom.html

It works, it's fast, it's free, we like it.

Wrong Answer!

[Greyfox]

About the only occupation that I can think of that wouldn't require at least some direct interaction with a computer on a day-to-day basis is garbage collection. And I could be wrong about that one. And a fairly high level of computer literacy is required at any university -- many of them require incoming freshmen to own a computer now.

In many cases the poorer students will not encounter computers at home. If they don't encounter them at school, we will be very effectively leveraging the digial divide into a more serious socio-economic problem. And I don't think that is what this country's about. At least not intentionally.

The Chico Unified School District...

[cduffy]

...has several Linux boxen up in different schools (one primary, one junior high). While the clients run Windows and MacOS, the fileservers and other backend systems are Linux boxen; thanks to Samba and Netatalk, they can share files to both sets of clients simultaniously, and they require very little maintenance (I do volunteer work when they go down -- it's been about a year since I touched one of them, though a few months less than that I wrote a trivial python script recompressing all students' GIFs into JPEGs for one teacher adminning the labs).

A student learns to think, by thinking, not by

[HanzoSan]

Not by doing work, homework, tests, paperwork, all that will teach them is how to complete a task in a timely fashion.

You teach a kid to think, by having discussions, having the kid write about the discussions and share their thoughts in debates. Having kids research on their own independently and gain knowledge, and then form their own conclusions.

Re:Is Linux really cheaper in the end?

[johnnyb]

You know, I haven't seen anyone who has rolled out Linux in the past year who has turned back. In the schools where they are trying it, it is actually proving to be a great success.

Linux & Open Source

[jcuzzola]

We have been successful in installing three Linux labs (approx 35 computers per lab) with Open Source software using the computers as thin clients (see LTSP.org). The system has been received very well by students and teachers. We were even able to give 486SXs with as little as 12Megs ram internet access - these systems are now in the classroom. We have approx. 10 schools scheduled for conversion to Linux by the end of 2002 with the goal of having all our elementary schools (60+) switched over in three. It's always an uphill battle but I feel we're fighting "the good fight". When they(Microsoft & others) tell you every open source initiative has failed tell them otherwise. I equate Microsoft with the movie "The Matrix" in which everyone goes on with their everyday lives while only a small liberated few no the truth. Our Linux Labs have worked better than anything Windows has ever given us for a cost that can't be beat.

John Cuzzola
jcuzzola@sd73.bc.ca
1383-9th Avenue
System Analyst/Programmer
Kamloops, BC V2C 3X7
School District #73
Phone: (250) 374-0679

Re:Linux & Open Source

[brock10]

What John didn't mention is that the trial schools were actually dual boot Win/RedHat. The kids preferred the RH (and that cuddly mascot) and simply didn't use the Windows. It was removed as a consequence.
The potential to reduce tech support is also huge - the kids can't screw things up without some sophisticated knowledge. Can't say the same for Windows boxes! Now the techs can do real work instead of 'clean up' chores ;-)

Teaching To What Is Used

[elefantstn]

I've heard this argument more than once, and here's how I always respond:

"Yeah, I guess you're right. That WordPerfect for DOS training I got in high school [class of '97] is really paying off in the business world now."

There's no point in trying to teach applications, because even if the one prevalent today is the one used when you graduate, it will still be totally different. Schools should be teaching general computer knowledge and UI paradigms -- give kids the tools to figure it out on their own. Teaching Word and Excel should be kept to one-week night classes and "...For Dummies" books; it has no place in the education system.

Another Example

[lnbertagnolli]

Springfield High, in Springfield Illinois.
They have a student organization, Students for Integrations of Technology and Education (SITE),
and have established the first high school chapter of the AITP. Everything has been done with donated hardware/software/linux, by the students.Check it out:
http://www.shs.springfield.k12.il.us/clubs/site/ in dex.html

Here's one in sweden

[Znork]

Interesting thin client solution running linux on even old 486 computers.

The implementing companys press release is here: http://www.codefactory.se/news/?1+1.

Re:My boxen are haxored but I'm still l33t

[flacco]

Can we please stop saying 'boxen'? It's just one more reason for a non-geek to want to punch you in the face....

Yeah, well I'd punch you back, and then we'd be boxen.

An open source elementry school

[tyrani]

I am the system administrator for a moderatly sized private elementry school. When I started, the school had very few computing resources at it's 2 campuses. After making a list of what I wanted to accompish in 2 years, I added up the costs and found that they it would be beyod my budget to buy new workstations and build a dedicated server all based on commercial software.

Here's what I've been able to create for the school:

1 workstation for every 4 children
So when a class is in the library there is 1 student per computer. They all run win98.

I am working towards 1 laptop for each teacher
So far there is 2, they are wirelessly 802.11b connected to the network.

A dedicated Red Hat 7.2 server
Squid proxy, web page filtering and monitoring Squirrel Mail IMAP web based e-mail, samba, LDAP student/teacher contact and vital information, a MySQL powered bookmark database, Apache Web server, and a digital picture gallery.

Everything on the server is open source and works flawlessly. All of this would have cost a fortune to buy and maintain on a NT server.

I am very interested in what software other people are running if they are doing the same thing that I am. Reply to this comment or e-mail me with what you run, I'd love to share tips.

Re:MS Academic Software is cheap

[Hiro Antagonist]

My company provides IT support to a small-medium sized K-12 school district. They have 5 NT servers, and approximatly 250 workstations running Windows2000/Office2000. I can see no scenario where it would make sense to move them to a free software platform (Linux). MS academic software is not that expensive to start with, so there's not much money to be saved here (approx $50 for Win2k and $50 for Office per station.) Most of the software used by the district would not run under Linux anyway. Aside from the webmail app and their web based library system nearly everything else they use is written for Windows. They couldn't run any of their current educational software packages, including those provided by the state! I love Linux and see that it has a place on the server, embedded in devices and running on hobbiests' machines. However considering the realities of IT today, it just doesn't make sense to roll out Linux on the desktops of organizations either commercial or educational.


Commercial, no.

Educational, yes.

I can see no reason that students can't be taught to use a word processor rather than just Microsoft Word -- learning basic concepts instead of "monkey see, monkey click."

Educational software is, for the most part, a complete crock; and, with the exception of grade-keeping software, doesn't belong in schools. Teachers are paid to teach, not to sit a student in front of some so-called "educational" program and baby-sit them. Some of the computer tutorial software, like the programs that teach you to use Word and Excel by visually showing you what to do, are effective; but these aren't the types of things schools are trying to teach.

The hardware costs make it much more expensive to run Windows in a school environment; Windows and Office 2000 require fairly high-powered workstations which cost the school real money to purchase; comparitive systems to run OSes like BSD and Linux are often donated en masse.

Having all of the computer equipment donated to a school by a business that wants the tax write-off can save even a small school tens of thousands of dollars; which, in turn, can go into things like art programs, improving science education, and hell -- even keeping the school in sporting goods. Go and ask a local principal what they would do if they were given an extra $20,000 to spend at the school on anything but salaries or computers.

As far as not being qualified for anything but "hobbiests", what do you think students are? A hobbiest is someone who is interested in learning as much about something as possible; and a student is someone who is supposed to be learning as much about the subject material as possible. Students aren't like employees -- there is no bottom line to watch, and no such thing as wasted time as long as it's spent learning.

free software may mean more money

[Proud Geek]

Using Linux on file servers and web servers is almost always a clear win for schools. Most computers in schools aren't file servers or web servers; they are desktops for students to complete assignments and do research.

Unfortunately, Free desktop environments like GNOME and KDE are much more resource intensive than Windows. For schools with middle aged hardware, running these environments is not an option. In this case, there is a clear cost win for Windows.

Luckily, it will all change with Windows XP (or should that be Windows PX for PentiumX required).

Donated computers generally don't help schools

[John Murdoch]

Hi!

The scene: "Public Comment" time at a school board meeting. The previous speaker, a senior citizen, has spoken at length about the burden of school taxes on the elderly in the community. He has particularly emphasized his opposition to the blatantly gold-plated technology proposals in the school budget (including the 4--count 'em, 4! PDAs for the district IT staff). Then the school board's self-designated Taxpayer Advocate clears his throat, and says, "Y'know, I was talking to our IT director at work the other day, and we're getting rid of a bunch of computers. Some are 486s, but a lot are Pentiums--we could provide a lot of those machines to the district at little or no cost....

...And another dumb IT decision is in the offing. Lots of people want to donate their downstreamed equipment to the schools. Sometimes they genuinely think they're doing good: most of the time they're trying to claim a tax credit for the contribution, and will "suggest" valuations for each machine that they drop off. All too often those donations cost the district actual cash--because you have to pay a HazMat hauler to take the monitors these days.

Linux and other free (as in beer) software may well have a place in education. There is a very powerful argument, for instance, for creating an Office-type suite with extensive classroom management tools. Given that school environments can be extraordinarily hostile (think of the kinds of behavior that occurs in a middle school classroom if the teacher steps out into the hall) there is a persuasive argument to be made for a robust platform like (ahem) FreeBSD.

But. Please please please do not even think of saddling the poor, overworked techs at your local school district with your worn-out, leftover, good-for-nothing junk. You are doing them no favors, you are doing no good to the district, and you are probably preventing adoption of a well-thought-through technology plan by "donating" your scrap equipment.

Computers in schools
I'm on the Technology Committee of the Nazareth (Pa.) Area School District. We've played out that scenario at the top of this post several times. We have had several area companies offer to donate their scrap to us. We have had several board members get positively indignant that we have spurned those offers. We did spurn those offers, and if I have any say in the matter we will continue to spurn those offers--here's why.

This is a hostile environment
Suppose your employer decides to install a new computer system. And suppose a computer-phobic customer service rep decides that he doesn't want to use the new system. Your employer has a simple remedy: fire the CSR. Doesn't work that way in American schools: if you want the teacher to use a computer, you have to persuade her/him.

This is a hostile environment #2
Teachers (no surprise, right?) don't want to look stupid in front of their students. But the kids are substantially more adept with computers than the teachers--so the teachers have a built-in ambivalence (at best) about computers.

So we have to persuade teachers to use a device that potentially can humiliate them in front of their students. How?
From hard-won experience, the district IT staff has to offer absolutely bullet-proof reliability. They have to be able to guarantee--and deliver on that guarantee--that the computers will be there, working flawlessly, whenever the teacher wants. No reboots, no network hassles, no video driver conflicts (elementary teachers probably use more video games than CmdrTaco), no need to get an MSCE in order to teach 3rd grade. In other words, the district IT staff has to provide Service Level Agreement-style functionality.

But...
do you think this means that anybody is willing to pay for a district IT staff? Funny boy--the school board will fund an extra assistant to the wrestling program in a heartbeat, but they won't spend a dime for a part-time LAN geek unless you do some major politicking. So what IT staff you have (4100 students, 450 employees, 7 buildings over 80 square miles, 3.5 IT staff) have to make do with what they have.

Which means...
They have to standardize, standardize, standardize. Every elementary classroom has to have the same video cards; every machine has to have the same network adapter; every machine in the high school has to have the same monitor. They have to develop a formalized bug-tracking system to identify recurring problems, and they have to take a systemic view of the entire IT picture in order to maintain 100% uptime. Because if they provide less than 100% uptime the teachers will stop using the system, and the parents will start calling the school board. And so forth....

So please...
Don't "do the kids a favor" and ship them junk. If you want to make a meaningful donation, call the school district and ask if you can give them the money to buy another one of their reference desktops. If they're running Windows, hold your nose and buy Windows. If they're running a bunch of out-of-date kiddie games, hold your nose and buy the out-of-date kiddie games. Do not make their lives miserable by sending them leftovers, or by going out to Circuit City and buying a $399 special. (God save the IT staff from the enthusiasm of the PTA.)

If you want to champion Open Source in the schools
Don't go preaching Linux as religion. Get involved, go to meetings, be prepared to make a reasonable case, and be prepared to argue for a complete replacement of the entire district IT infrastructure. And be prepared for war from the elementary teachers and the PTA: elementary school software runs on Windows, period. If you want to replace it, you'd best have a bunch of kids games tested and ready to go.

Bottom line:
Computers are crucial to education in the 21st century. I teach in a graduate program, and I'm constantly amazed at the number of MBA students with only the faintest glimmer of understanding about computers and technology. But the route to learning about computers and technology is not with leftover junk--it is with a carefully-developed, meticulously-managed, (and yes, sometimes rigidly enforced) IT plan that promises a "100% school time up time" service level, and delivers it. If the users can trust that the computers will be there, they will learn. If they can't trust the computers, they will learn to hate them.

Re:Donated computers generally don't help schools

[John Murdoch]

We faced the same problems you addressed but we did something about it and it's working. ;-)

I beg to differ.

I applaud the success that you have had--but I note that on your demo site you take pains to point out the specific motherboard, video, and network adapters that you used, based on your prior knowledge of their reliability. Which, um, sounds like precisely what I was saying. If the local mill walked into one of your managed classrooms and dropped off a stack of IBM Micro-Channel PS/2 boxes, what would you do?

And more to the point, what would you do if you had to support not that one classroom, but scores of classrooms across a large geographical area? And support all the other aspects of the district's technology program at the same time? (The telephones, cable TV, building security systems--even the headsets for the football and soccer coaches.)

I note, particularly, that your organization focuses on 4th to 8th graders. It would be very informative to hear why you do not provide services for pre-K through 3rd grade. Is it, perhaps, because of the massive amounts of curriculum software available (not to even mention the "third-party" game software teachers always use) all of it depends upon DOS and/or Windows? And getting any two packages to work together simultaneously on most video cards is a cast-iron b*tch? (Lurkers: if you're not familiar with the problem, trust me: the hardest classrooms to provide computers to are the K-3 classes. The video driver problems would curl your hair.)

A working solution in a single classroom is not, by a long stretch, the same thing as providing IT services across the entire school district.

Please forgive me if I sound a little petulant. But I take umbrage at the toss-off line at the bottom of your post to the effect that "...we did something about it." I resent that--we busted buns to develop a district-wide IT plan. We measured user ability, satisfaction, and use before we implemented the plan; we measured ability, satisfaction, and use after we implemented the plan. We deliver "100% school time up time", while computer usage in the district has soared, and machine outages have dropped to essentially zero. The IT plan has done so well that the IT staff has effectively slit their own throats: the school board almost eliminated one of the (3.5) positions last year because things were going so well.

Re:Donated computers generally don't help schools

[John Murdoch]

...it seems like there are a few people/communities who have overcome things that you and you collaboraters were not able to hack.

I've looked through most of the higher-mod'd posts--paying particular attention to been-there/done-that posts. Let me suggest that the stories fall into three categories:

1. We set up a Linux box! One or two volunteers set up a Linux box as a web server, proxy server, mail server (or all three).
2. We set up three Linux boxes! A squad of volunteers set up several Linux boxes as network file storage. Great idea--but once again we come back to the scalability problem. One box functioning as a NAS server sounds great--but how do you back it up? And if you have 3, or 5, or 8 boxes with different hardware configurations, scattered across the district, how do you back them up? Remember--school districts have lots of buildings across big geographical areas. Sending somebody around with a stack of DLT tapes is not a good solution. A standardized NAS box (with a standardized tape drive, or a centralized backup method) is a lot more maintainable solution.
3. I scrounged up 5|10|25 386sx|386|486 boxes for my classroom, and installed Linux! I have tremendous respect for teachers willing to do this--but the consequence is inevitably the circumstance that I described in my original post: the fact that somebody can cobble together two dozen cast-offs encourages the school board to cut funding for new hardware or IT support staff.

It's easy to applaud that heroic teacher with 25 386 computers in his classroom at a high school in New Orleans. But that guy is almost part of the problem, not the solution. Because the school board is doubtless saying, "see--we have computers in our schools." They're computers most Third World educators would be ashamed of, but they have computers in the schools, by golly.

Think about the end result:
At the end of the student's school career he or she will go off to college, or go into the work force. If the student gets a job, he or she will be confronted with systems that are radically faster, more capable, and substantially more complex. The student will be substantially behind the curve. His peer that went to college will be worse off: competing against students from districts that invested in technology and offered things like AP courses in programming (C++). The kids in a New Orleans classroom with 25 386sx and 386 boxes are dead meat on a stick when they have to compete against kids from a district that assigned PowerPoint slide projects as homework for 7th graders. (Not that PowerPoint is good--I think PP numbs the brain. But kids who are familiar with the tools at that age have a HUGE advantage in college and in the workplace.)

Bottom line: shipping scrap to the local schools may give you a tax write-off, but it ends up doing nothing (or worse) for the kids.

GNU skole (GNU school)

[Nau.dk]

GNU skole is a project, working to bring free software (GNU/Linux) into elementary school in Denmark. Run by admins for admins.

They do an effort to get educational software translated into Danish, and they're writing guides to other admins wanting to integrate free software in their school network.

Teachers Are Paid Too Little?

[Nail]

Disclaimer: My wife is a teacher and I would benefit economically if they were paid more money.

I find it sad that some say "teachers are paid too little" when quoted this price or that, but never seem to be able to put a dollar value on teaching labor themselves.

It irritates me because I think if someone is going to complain about a problem, they should at least offer solution to it (even an imperfect one). If they don't, it doesn't even matter whether they fully understand the problem or not, they are simply 'stirring the pot'.

SEUL.ORG

[tacocat]

SEUL.ORG has some educational experiences that they have been gathering up. I am also working on starting one in SouthEast Michigan. I also know of a few others in this area that have gone well. Contact me for more information if you need to.

Critical Misunderstanding of My Post

[John Murdoch]

Hi!

Thanks for taking the time to write. However, I'm not sure we're communicating. You have described a splendid concept for a computer-oriented program for older students. You suggest that you could have done all of what you propose at age 10 (start from fdisked machines, a stack of CDs, and a pile of printed README documents). You seem to suggest that since you could have done this, anybody could have done this. And you seem to think that spending an entire year doing this would be beneficial.

Alas, the Pennsylvania Department of Education would probably disagree. They would vastly prefer if the district's 10-year-olds were engaged in other pedagogical pursuits: reading, writing, 'rithmetic, sex education, drug-awareness education, enviro/political behavior modification, etc.

Please forgive the sarcasm, but please also understand that the focus of computers in classrooms is not to make computer techs out of the 6th graders. The point is to use the computers to learn academic subjects. We don't want students, or teachers, to ever have to think about partitioning a hard drive or re-compiling the OS kernel. We want them to think about using e-mail to collaborate with an "email pal" across the world; or to use NetMeeting or Groove to collaborate with students in other district buildings. The computer is not the raison d'etre--it is the tool.

Have you seen Xanadu?

[Graymalkin]

Free software ideologically works well in schools. It can be inexpensive to impliment and once you've got a good set-up going you're pretty much set unless you need to do like some major overhaul of something. Linux and FreeBSD are just a bit more robust than Windows and have enough software available for them to teach people the computer concepts they need. It's better to teach them concepts anyhow, the OS underneath doesn't matter much if you teach them the difference between ASCII and binary files, that it means when something is executable, and the basic tenents of word processing. They don't need high school to teach them highly technical skills, thats what they pay to go to college or trade school for. Trying to make the high school responsible for producing workplace ready people overextends their already meager funds.

However the bad thing about Free software is the lack of an educational infrastructure. Linux works well if you wanna use a computer to teach people about computers but what happens when you want to teach people about literature or history? Responses to that question including the word "internet" will be ignored. Why? When you're looking for something specific most of the internet is just complete cruft. Although there are some good sites you can use it sucks trying to them for educational purposes at times. It'd suck to have a page up on the projector and then have some x10 popup dominate the screen. It's far too distracting for trying to teach somebody something. Using the web as a info reference is tricky because if they don't know anything about what they're researching they'll grab a bunch of "facts" from Joe's House of History and turn it in not having learned anything. I think a free OS would be a good idea for schools if you could build a curriculum and not have the OS holding you up. Computers are information tools, not an end unto themselves. If you're going to deploy a free solution to your problem make sure it fills ALL of the requirements, not just be less expensive than Microsoft.

Re:This won't sit well with the Open Sourcers...

[Rogerborg]

• MS is the mainstream..

What you are saying basically boils down to: it's easier to support an illegal monopoly than it is to support alternatives.

I find anti-trust laws distasteful, but you've just demonstrate exactly why we actually need them. Laziness, least-common-denominator thinking, quantity before quality. Not values I want my children to learn, not at all.

I will, thank you...

[Svartalf]

Most people will not use the "wealth" of features Office provides. What they use, is already there for Linux. Seems you're missing out on something as I've been using Star Office with MS Office only workplaces for 5 years now without any real issues on my or anyone else's part. "Behind" is a relative term, mister_sparkle, and I've seen Office XP and wasn't impressed- the offerings are less behind than what you think.

What about teaching them to think for themselves?

[Svartalf]

That is what school is all about, isn't it? If you're going to teach them about the real world, then perhaps yes, you need to teach them about MS Office, but you also need to teach them about WordPerfect (MS Office doesn't run on Mainframes, but it does- and there is a LOT of places that still use Mainframes in the office context), StarOffice (there's a lot of places out there using that as well- more than you'd like to think), and others.

The real world is less homogenous than you and MS would like for to believe it is. Teaching them just MS Office isn't preparing them for office work- it's preparing them for insisting on a monopolist's product offering. Doing what I suggest would be real training for that.

And, I hold that schools are not for training laborers (office or otherwise)- they're to get everyone on the same common ground of knowlege so that we can work together in many contexts.

VNC doesn't do multiple sessions...

[Svartalf]

It only does one. Think of VNC under Windows as more of a Carbon Copy replacement (which it does a fairly good job of...).

Re:you could try this.

[Syberghost]

In your second link, the very first part of it says I'm right; if you have two disks eith an individual MTBF of 10,000 hours, you'll have a failure every 5,000 hours on average. Which is exactly what I said, only I was using 200 units with an individual MTBF of 56,000 hours.

I pulled those numbers out of my ass as examples, but the math was 100% correct, according to the very links you quoted as rebuttal.

Re:sounds are bad!

[MrResistor]

Retention and comprehension is more important than speed. So what if you read 25% slower than everyone else if you only have to read it once and they have to read it 2 or 3 times? That's been my experience, anyway.

But, if you really want to read faster, try tracking under the words with your finger. It sounds stupid, but the increased focus allows you to read much faster with the same retention and comprehension.

Re:Careful which geeks you punch..

[flacco]

In my last year of high-school there were two of us exceptionally scary geeks and for once the geeks in the school were shoving jocks out of their way. Protection for your own is a great thing.

Protection from your muscle-bound cousin, who was a runner-up in a state-wide body-building contest, is also a good thing :-)

Re:sounds are bad!

[dillon_rinker]

NEWS FLASH! The written English language is based on the way words sound! Each sound is represented by a (non-unique) letter. Pedagogical techniques for teaching children to read should include phonics; lots of practice reading permits you to move on to memorizing how words look. If you haven't moved on, I'd suggest you're either fairly young or have a learning disability of some kind. I was taught only phonics but I can tell at a glance what a word is.

The reason for using phonics is that most people who learn to read already know the language. They don't need to learn it again. They merely need to know how to translate what they hear and say into writing and vice versa.

Whole language reading is useful but not all encompassing. The same is true for phonics. Both have their place; you can't advance as a reader (as you point out) if you continue to be dependent on phonics, but you can't leverage years of experience with the English language unless you use phonics. A mixed approach is highly effective.