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UK Schools At Risk of Microsoft Lock-In

Posted by kdawson on from the apple-for-the-teacher dept.

Robert writes "UK schools and colleges that have signed up to Microsoft Corp's academic licensing programs face the significant potential of being locked in to the company's software, according to an interim review by Becta, the UK government agency responsible for technology in education. The report also states that most establishments surveyed do not believe that Microsoft's licensing agreements provide value for money." In a separate report, Becta offered the opinion that schools should avoid Vista for at least another year, since neither Vista nor Office 2007 offers any compelling reasons for schools to upgrade.

2 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Re:why not to use them in schools by ILuvRamen · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    ARE YOU HIGH?!
    Get out of that bullshit old teacher mentallity that if it's on the internet, it's not true and if it's too easy to learn, it's not being taught correctly and let kids do research on it.

    --
    Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
  2. Re:scope in the curriculum .. by Omicron32 · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Right.

    Our kids don't decide what to use, and I think my sentence makes perfect sense.

    I provide support for a High School with 350 machines, and 4 local primary schools with another 100 machines total on top of that. Our licensing agreement covers the primaries machines as well, hence the discrepency with the numbers.

    Actually, Linux is used on 4 backend servers (one more was put in recently) - 4 proxies, one for us at the High, and three for the primaries (one has an ISA server they wont let me replace). Once again, the confusion of numbers is cos I'm talking about the high school on it's own, rather than all the machines I support.

    Teachers aren't interested in Linux or Open Source, they don't have the time, seriously. This ties in with your next point in that I said there is no scope in the CURRICULUM for alternative operating systems - the teachers teach the curriculum, not what they want to teach.

    Your last point is null because I'm a sysadmin, not a teacher. I can't change that, they can. I just keep the things running.

    So, your post should be Score: -5, Troll, Bullshitter, Blown out.