Slashdot Mirror
Best IT Solution For a Brand-New School?
Iain writes "I'm a teacher at a British 'City Academy' (ages 11-19) that is going to move into a new building next year. Management is deciding now on the IT that the students will use in the new building, as everything will be built from scratch. Currently, the school has one ICT suite per department, each containing about 25-30 PCs. My issue with this model is that it means these suites are only rarely used for a bit of googling or typing up assignments, not as interactive teaching tools. The head likes the idea of moving to a thin client solution, with the same one room per department plan, as he see the cost benefits. However, I have seen tablet PCs used to great effect, with every single classroom having 20-30 units which the students use as 'electronic workbooks,' for want of a better phrase. This allows every lesson to fully utilize IT (multimedia resources, Internet access, instant handout and retrieval of learning resources, etc.) and all work to be stored centrally. My question is: In your opinion, what is the best way for a school to use IT (traditional computer lab, OLPCs, etc.) and what hardware is out there to best serve that purpose? Fat clients for IT/Media lessons and thin client for the rest? Thin client tablets? Giving each student a laptop to take home? Although, obviously, cost is an issue, we have a significant budget, so it should not be the only consideration."
The old lab model is dead. Take your 20-30 computers, make them laptops, and available for any classroom use the teachers need. If demands becomes such that you can't meet demand, then you buy more. Add wireless throughout the place, and you should be set.
I'm UK taxpayer. This question highlights what I think is an endemic problem with the UK teaching system, and frankly the whole of the civil service:
This sort of thing shouldn't even be up for debate.
Developing this sort of infrastructure on a school-by-school basis is incredibly stupid. There should have been a central government review of the options prior to the latest run of school building, and a proper IT spending policy should have been worked out then. Having the decision made by the headteacher and a couple of staff (only one or two of whom are likely to be remotely qualified to understand all the options) means one school ends up with a much better or worse IT system than another. That is plain wrong. It's not fair on the kids.
To answer the question, for the love of God find out how the other schools near you have faired with their systems and copy the best one. Do not do go it alone (or alone with lots of Slashdotters).
http://twitter.com/onion2k
I don't have as much faith in a computer for every student, in every class.
If it's anything like my college courses in the states, a lot of time might need to be devoted to keeping students on task, instead of checking social networking sites during class. Maybe things are different in Britain, though.
In my High School we had a rolling cart with 30 laptops inside it, a central charging supply, a printer and a wireless network. This was maybe the best idea our IT department ever had because when the computers were necessary they could come to the classroom where they were needed without the logistics of moving a couple of dozen teenagers. When they're not needed, they can be put in buffer or sent to where they are. The downtime you'd normally see of computers in class is not wasted and the budget is more effectively applied to all of the classrooms. It sounds like my school was a lot smaller than the one you're serving at, so maybe a lot more carts are needed than just the one, of course.
We used to use our textbooks as makeshift sleds... I'd recommend NOT giving every student a laptop to take home!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Lowest on going cost over all. And one admin to rule them all.
Tell me why throwing computers at the students will educate them "better" than having a professor standing at the front of the room moving a magnet along a glowing glass tube filled with argon showing them how the magnetic field "collapses" the light into a ribbon, with the students first entranced and then eagerly scribbling notes. And then in the next class having the students find the flaw in a mathematical proof covering two blackboards which "proves" that 2+2=5.
Stop thinking about computers & start thinking of the students.
If you are putting in a new school-wide network then wifi is probably a good idea. Just remember that every kid/teacher with a wifi-capable cell phone will try to use it too.
If the school is being wired from scratch then put a couple of Cat6s into every classroom. These can always be reticulated withion a classroom with switches or wifi.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Stay away from laptops and tablets! The students will only get distracted. Pencil and paper work much better for most subjects. Also, probably an even bigger issue is the teachers are going to have to focus a lot of their time on working out bugs and learning IT stuff, when they should be focusing on TEACHING. Until Apple makes an idiot proof Epod, stay away from this please. My first year of college, half of the students played Diablo 2 every class. These students didn't make it to their second year.
I think there is a future for this type of class, but not yet. The benefits would be automatic marking of multiple choice tests and math tests where you don't have to show your work. But there's just too many problems right now. Broken laptops, students looking at porn during classes, and instant messaging. Who's going to have the time to deal with all these distractions?
read some interesting stuff at mightyinteresting.com
I'm all for computers, having started programming back in '77 when a highcool math teacher took the private initiative to take some of us to an after school adult education class to learn programming, then building my own NASCOM-1 Z-80 kit in '78, and so on... I've been a professional programmer for over 25 years, and practically live on the computer at home doing hobbyist programming... So, I couldn't be a stronger advocate for the use and fun of using computers...
That all said, I'd have to go with the traditional computer lab model, preferably not just as a resource for homework research etc, but as a place for schedules hands-on computer lessons as part of the curriculum whether it be programming or even general computer use. I don't really see a useful place for computers in the classroom as part of other lessons, as it seems it would only be a distraction. The "enriched interactive multimedia experience" story-line may sound good at some level, but all it's really going to mean is that time that could have been spent covering and explaining core lesson material is instead spent faffing around with computers, watching videos, dealign with computer probolems etc.
If you want to have some cross-over between computer/programming classes and other lessons, then why not just encourage use of the internet as a research tool for homework assignments, maybe accept (or occasionally require) printed assignments as well as hand writen ones. This sort of approach would give the kids a useful introduction to preactical use of computers, an exposure to programming, but not do so at the expense of turning the core curruculum into am extended multimedia click-fest, and taking attention away from the teacher.
If you do take the opposite approach and bring computers into the classroom, then consider the scale of effort requires to develop computer based courses that are the equal of the textbook based material you currently teach. This sounds more like a mult-year national level effort, rather than something that a few teachers are going to be able to hack together in your own school.
I'd also echo what another poster wrote - don't go it alone! Reseach how other schools are using computers and what actually WORKS. Which schools have seen grades increase rather than decrease as a result of use of computers, and how does that correlate to the way they are using them?
The problem with technology in school isn't the tech, but how it is shoehorned into the existing teaching atmosphere. Cramming technology in the traditional monolithic classroom doesn't gain very much. Since every child learns differently, the most effective method is one teacher/mentor per child. That doesn't fit into any public school budget, but effective use of technology can mimic that effect. Online courses, built on an open system like Moodle, can leverage your teachers time. The example of student centric teaching from "Disrupting Class" by Christensen,Johnson and Horn is a good read. While a large number of desktop/laptops is desirable, the real key to success is turning your teachers into coach/mentors that give one on one help while capturing their repetitive activities like lecturing, quiz giving, and administration and automating them. The infrastructure and the way you teach is far more important that what they use as a desktop interface.
I think a lot of this is snakeoil. If it isn't immediately clear what advantage the computer will bring to the lesson, don't use the computer. There are cases when it is clear that the computer brings a lot of positives, but it isn't all cases by a longshot.
Computers can eat up class time with distractions and technical problems. And digital work lacks tangibility. Students respond better to paper homework with actual scores than to digital assignments with scores appearing on some webpage.
I know that these problems may be solvable in the future, but they aren't solved now.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
No matter what setup you choose, don't forget the most important ingredient: Training. Lots of it. Ongoing. Study after study has shown that technology only gets truly integrated into the classroom if both teachers and administrators get ongoing, regular professional development around both using it and working it into the curriculum. Not just one session before the start of the school year - at least a couple of years' worth of regular sessions to help them figure out how to use it in the lessons they're teaching. Without that, whatever you get will just go to waste.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
A relatively new option that should be looked at is providing each student with their own USB drive, at a cost of 10USD to 100USD each, depending on whether flash or spinning, and size. Load these with a standard image of portable FOSS software (assuming you are using Windows, look at the Portable Apps web site. There will be room enough for a full suite of portable applications plus storage for all text a student might author in the course of year. Plus, with the larger drives, enough room for libraries of whatever. Be worth the while to check what's now available through the Open CourseWare initiatives of MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and a host of other institutions. Some of it may be appropriate to the students in question, and you can't beat the price or accessibility.
A key to this approach is loading a portable image of Firefox that is preconfigured with the bookmarks and other features the school wants the students to have access to.
This showed a great deal of promise in an adult ed "Preparation For The WorkPlace" environment I was associated with until last July. The software was well received by students, especially Firefox with its bookmarks. They got very comfortable using it. These were on 1 GB thumb drives, which was more than adequate in size.
The portable OpenOffice.org component was not well received by those teachers who were already very defensive about their minimalist skill level with Microsoft Office, but that kind of resistance (of teachers being required to learn new software) is a separate issue that has to be faced no matter how software in the schools is updated.
Computers are wonderful tools, but for most subjects students learn at that point in their lives (middle/high school in the US), computers aren't necessary.
Think about the primary subjects - Math, Science, and Literature/Writing - where do you see the benefits in using computers? Obviously for English classes, having access to computers to type papers is handy, but it's hardly necessary. Computers can be used in math to help illustrate concepts, but you don't want the students using computers to do their work, otherwise they won't know how to do it without them. And much of science is math - again, not something you want students using computers for.
I do IT for a medical practice. What we ended up with was a central server running Fedora and LTS, with thin clients in each of the exam rooms and in the doctor's office.
This had all the benefits of getting the records available in each room without having to go through individual updates. There are still fat clients/full workstations in the office, but those are primarily for the other work--office manager, accounting, etc.
since each grade level is different (different lessons, different requirements), I would suggest having a server either for each classroom, grade level, or department. For example, your math classes would need different software (and access) than your English class. You could even set up your foreign-language classes to have the locale set to the language they teach--the kids would have to learn French, Spanish, Russian, etc to use the computers...and the casual contact with that language would reinforce the lessons.
True, you would lose some of the benefits of "one admin to rule them all," but the software and changes would be compartmentalized--and the Computer instructors could even have more free reign to fix (or damage) their systems as they see fit.
Never confuse movement with action. --Hemingway
I'm a senior in a private high school where every student has a tablet PC. Save for a few particularly tech-savvy teachers, it's quite lackluster compared to how the plan looks on paper.
First of all, you're looking at high upfront costs. A Lenovo X60 tablet, the model we use, runs between $1,500 and $2,000, and if you include the $300 yearly "technology fee" my school tacks on (presumably to pay the tech department's salaries), that's a pretty steep cost no matter who's paying it.
Which brings us to the maintenance side of things. Teenagers break cars, cell phones, and other crap all the time - why should they not be expected to drop (or in some cases, throw - yes I've witnessed it) their tablets to the floor? Maintenance costs are very likely to go through the roof, and I promise you that over the course of the first two years, you're going to see maintenance costs eclipse the upfront cost.
Moreover, you'll probably need a porn filter to keep them from looking up boobs, MySpace or YouTube. That requires servers, and you're probably looking at close to 50-100 requests per second at peak times. Meaning your transparent proxy will require some serious big iron to handle everything. Make sure your bandwidth is at least 20Mbit/sec, and be ready to block LimeWire, Bittorrent, and other bandwidth-sucking and potentially illegal traffic that your transparent HTTP proxy won't catch.
Lastly, if students have their own tablets and a virus goes rampant throughout your LAN (again, I have witnessed this) reformatting every laptop will be not only a pain in the ass, but also traumatic for students that don't know how to/don't feel like making backups. XP Tablet is also very unstable in my experience, so also think about whether you want to go the Linux route which of course will require manual configuration and extra training.
As for staff, my school has about 170 students in grades 7-12, and our tech department includes a director of technology (ana management), a repair technician, and a network admin. So you're looking at maybe 1 technician per 150 students plus one network admin per ~300 to help with auditing, server maintenance, and security.
All this, and how often does my school use these tablets? Maybe once a week they're a mandatory part of my classes. Most students (myself included) still do most notes on pen and paper and all of my teachers except for one give out all assignments on paper. To be honest, our tablets are probably used more for gaming (think, 2D Flash games) and who-can-find the-first-working-proxy-to-browse-Facebook contests.
Oh yeah. If any of your students know how to use SSH, and you allow unfiltered connections on ANY TCP port, your filtering will be down the tubes in seconds. Yes, I bypassed the porn filter 5 minutes before school started the first day two years in a row, and a few other students did too.
Just a few things to keep in mind if you do a tablet program. Sorry for any typos or inconsistency, I'm on an iPod touch and my thumbs cannot keep up with my brain.
I am working with Asus EEE PCs in a Milton Keynes school -I am at the Open University and we are part of the Personal Inquiry project. Happy to chat offline if you'd like to hear about our experiences.
Main issues: variable levels of student computer literacy, support and management of laptops, making sure the devices transparently connect to the school network, other school computers on shared drives and home networks, ethical issues (schools and homes having different policies on what students can access), students using laptops as tool to play with instead of working (i.e. using the games/distraction software and functionalities).
I live in Kuwait and during my time in college, instructors have tried various "electronic" solutions like a smart board or a basic power point presentation, avoiding being interactive with students on a blackboard.
In all cases, it was always a bad idea. The smart board had problems (virus infcetions, IP conflicts, windows crashes, ...etc.) and power point presentations were dull -- myself and many others were almost asleep and drooling (and I was sitting in the first row!).
The instructor's solution to the power point presentation pandemic? Back to the blackboard and everyone woke up.
I'm in for well-maintained labs, and would stir away from giving each student a laptop/tablet. The students would abuse those machines much more than they'd benefit from them.
Teachers are there to interact with students, but by giving each student a machine, the attention would be diverted to these boxes and teachers would start pushing content into students' boxes...
Mod points are a dangerous tool. Abuse them wisely.
Here's a scenario for you, that will cater to your needs:
Buy the most power machine money can buy - up to about £3000 in terms of CPU power, lots of RAM, and every storage slot filled with high capacity storage - stick with SATA if available, otherwise SAS disks will do.
Then, go to Viglen, and buy their crappy little £79 PCs that go on the back of the monitor with a VESA mount. They're shockingly underpowered - 400MHz, but they make fantastic thin clients.
You can run about 100 think clients on such a system, and it'll work really nicely.
However, it being a school - there's no chance it'll take off, and you'll be stuck with the same rubbish everyone else is.
As an IT professional, I actually am against computers in schools. Typing is all well and good, but kids these days already know Google and Word, anything they actually need for modern business is pretty much self-taught or taught at their first place of employment.
Computers are the bane of the modern UK school system.
Laptop Carts are the way to go. They are small, efficient, mobile, and more than enough for any task needed in school.
I'd say 1-2 carts with a classroom's worth of laptops, a wireless router/AP, and wireless printer (or regular printer plugged into a wireless router/ap that can act as a print server). Brand would be whoever can offer the best support contract, Dell, HP, etc. Stay away from OLPC or EEE's while I love Open Source they are too crippled and you can always install Linux (or live CDs) on a regular laptop if the desire is there.
Then if there would be the room/money available have one lab with desktops for any/all other needs. The other item would be USB thumbdrives for each student (they can be reasonably small like 1GB) and lock out the ability to save to anything but the thumbdrives. A projector may be useful for the cart too.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Beyond IT uses for the computers, I recommend the following rather than their computer simulations:
The price of slate these days?
Oh for smileys on /.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
with hardware and software suppliers! If they do, you will end up with expensive Windows systems, and inferior commercial software with "good" prices.
Major hardware and software vendors already have established deals for educational institutions. Linux distributions like Ubuntu are (by most accounts) superior to Windows, and cost nothing.
My recommendation would be to use Linux and other open-source software. Open Office does most of what Microsoft Office does. There is graphics software, video-editing software, and software of every variety you could want, all open-source and little to no cost.
But if they start to "negotiate" with commercial vendors, they will end up with commercial products at substantial cost, and questionable worth (comparatively speaking).
Use LTSP. Depending on the amount of clients, one or more servers and then many clients.
- LTSP clients are cheap, and they don't need client side maintenance except for hardware failures.
- Startup time for the computers is very small. With normal computers it can take 15 minutes to start up the computers, with LTSP it is a minute or less. This is important, because it is taken away from the school time.
- LTSP clients don't have hard drives, so they dont' break so easily.
- LTSP clients need less electricity, so you will save in electricity bills.
- You will be practically virus free
- Students can use any computer in any class (if you have them in several classes) and always get their own desktop.
- New clients are cheap and easy to add to the netnwork (unless you add so many that you need to add servers also, but that is not very hard either)
- Teachers can control the clients and easily e.g. disable them when they should not be used.
- Maintenance is cheap as pretty much only the server needs maintenance.
- Software licenses are free with Linux, OpenOffice.org etc.
- It has been used in schools before and total savings in costs have been 70% compared to Windows desktop computers. (Note this is only one study and it contains the expenses from transforming a Windows environment into Linux environment)
You know, this is one of those areas where I wish educational systems would take a more scientific approach to these types of problems. It's pretty much the same way here in the U.S.
There seems to be little 'method' to the ways we try to figure out the 'best' ways to integrate IT into education.
It seems to me that in situations like this, schools could benefit from systematically applying the scientific method - Observations, Hypothesis, Prediction, Experiment, Analysis. (Repeat as necessary.)
Start building a *theory* of education and IT, and then make your school IT decisions and budgets based upon the body of theory thus developed.
So, this means that you gather lots of ideas from all sorts of people (everyone from Education Ph.Ds, down to teachers and IT staff at the schools, even to interested members of the public who have ideas) about how IT could be better implemented in education, and start using a small number of schools as experimental test beds (and other schools as 'control data' for the experiments).
These experiments should be, first, submitted to and approved by some national 'school board', or at least something like a group of professors at a University education department, who are tasked with tracking and eventually reporting on the results. From the results, this 'school board', or university task force, or whoever is responsible, can start creating recommendations and best practices.
I would start with wiring the building and then if you have a need to establish a lab, then you simply add local switches as necessary. I realise that there is a move to wireless networks, but they don't achieve the necessary speeds for certain applications, and prevents you from easily making your network secure. While this may not matter to students, for the administration this may be an issue. Once you have your physical infrastructure in place, then depending on usage requirements, you add severs and PCs according to needs. I tend to try to try to establish a network where Linux, MacOS X and Windows can all share resources, since that way there is no need to deal with multi-platform support as an after thought.
The other thing is to ensure that a competent systems administrator is in place ;)
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The major reason computer technology deployments for K-12 education (in the US at least..)and failed to deliver on it's promises while becoming a black hole of spending in the 90s and early 2000's, is that the approach was similar to the one you describe here.
Back then, we gave teachers and administrators the latest, greatest technology and expected them to figure out how to use it in order to make instruction better. Some teachers did just that, but they were few and far between. These early adopters created pockets of technology and inconsistency/inequality of instruction across the school landscape. In the worst cases, the technology sat gathering dust in the classroom closet.
Several years ago I participated in a large-scale Gates Foundation grant to study various models of instruction and gather measurable data about those models. ( Before you jump up-and-down about Micro$oft dealing Windows to our kids, you should know that of the 9 million in grant funding, only 10% could be spent on technology... the majority had to be used to study the instructional outcomes of the various school models.)
As the result of that study we found a number of proven technologies and techniques that helped to enhance the learning experience.
1) Before you buy a single piece of Tek, you need an instructional technology plan that will show how the equipment and software that you choose will create the instructional outcomes you want. Results MUST be measurable so that you can share them with the public (partial to justify the expense...) and instructional staff so that you can build and refine your techniques. The plan should be at least 3 years in depth and be flexible enough to absorb changes in administration and instructional staff. If you do not do this first, all the tek in the world wont help you educate kids.
2) Develop a support plan and a refresh cycle. This is the IT side of the house. You plan should include long term training both for new staff and a constant refreshers for existing staff. You want admin computing (see #3 below ) to be a no-brainier so you can concentrate your resources on the instructional side of the house.
3) Deploy a standardized technology to instructors and administrators in order to cover the rote administrative tasks like grading, email, communication, Internet research, and word processing. Thin client works very well for this. It's robust and consistent.
4) No Classroom Computers in Grades K-3: Children at these ages need to focus on interpersonal and cognitive skills. Computer Technology at this level has been shown in many studies to decrease the learning process.
5) Deploy Smartboards, LCD Projectors, a Presentation PC with an attached "Elmo", and classroom sound amplification system (such as the "FrontRow" product). Of all this equipment, the piece that will make the most difference is the amplification system. This technology has been proven time and time again to increase student learning/comprehension and at the same time, reduce teacher absenteeism.
6) Consider learning labs and mobile devices such as tablets and laptop carts, if they fit into your instructional technology and support plans and maximize your available resources.
And just some tips from my own years of experience in edTek:
-Break the low voltage data infrastructure wiring out from the general contractor who is building your new school. Generals don't understand the big-picture of data. Be sure that the IT staff is involved in the deployment and design of your plant.
-Don't skimp on power outlets and data jacks!
-Laptop carts can be very heavy when fully loaded. If you use them, go with more small ones with fewer laptops.
-If you engage a consultant(s) to oversee your tek deployment, be sure they have lots of experience with school technology. Business folks often don't understand the differences that exist between the private sector and education.
Don't fret over the Windows/Mac/Linux issue for instruction. If your teachers are edu
A new school went up in my area. They installed a projector mounted to the ceiling of every classroom, with wiring run through the wall to the teacher's computer, with additional hookups for elmos, DVD players, etc. That's a pretty nifty solution.
At my school, there's a limited number of projector carts available, and an even smaller number of carts with their own computer or an elmo included. If a teacher planned a lesson around certain tools and suddenly the cart they need isn't available, they are out of luck. Some teachers end up purchasing their own equipment because they can't reliably get a hold of the school's. You should see some of the hack jobs that are done just to get a projector running - video cables suspended across pathways to a projector pointing at an angle to a wall, stuff like that.
Here is a link to information on the Bradford BSF deployment if you can't visit the school in person.
I was too harsh in my criticism if thin clients. I've seen some excellent educational software delivered as thin clients. I've even worked on some. And at this point you could really teach using most business applications with thin clients. But, I still wouldn't want an entire school's technology limited to what runs in a web browser. Possibly it is because my own kids spend too much time on the web and on the little screens on their phones, I would like them to get deeper into some applications at school.
I work for a school district in the US and the bang for your money is Active Whiteboards and software such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activstudio. It was incredible how this technology really enabled better teaching and interactions with the kids. The next thing is mobile labs of laptops. However, these do require a good wireless support network. ski
I think the Physics department at my university has done a good job of applying this principle. They used an online homework platform for most of the assignments for the General Physics classes I had to take as part of my engineering program. Now the thing about homework is, you don't really learn much from problems which you solved wrong, and then only learned you solved them wrong when they are marked incorrect by your teacher (which is the 'traditional' method). Usually, in such a traditional method, the teacher will hopefully spend some time in class going over problems students got wrong, so they could at least see the correct way to solve the problem, but it's still not as good a learning experience as when you figure out how to do it yourself.
With this online homework platform, students got up to 5 chances to get the solution correct. That is, if you solved the problem, inputted your answer in the website, and your answer was not correct, it would notify you the answer was not correct (but would not tell you what the right answer is), and give you a chance to try again. I personally found this to be an excellent teaching tool - simply knowing that my answer was not right gave me the chance to go back and look at the problem, and try to figure out where my mistake was. Almost all of the time, I could figure out my mistake, and correct it within 1 or 2 tries - something I never had the opportunity to do in classes I took earlier in my academic career. I truly believe that having those additional chances to correct my own mistakes helped me to learn the material better.
This is one example of something that is not easy to do without computers, but quite easy to do with computers.
What's the point in teaching them Linux?
The point of the parent wasn't to "teach linux" but to teach whatever subject the teacher is teaching (geography, maths, etc.) using free software to project the presentations, because the legal implications of using unlicensed proprietary software in a class room are financially dangerous.
When they get out into the real world they will find out that most companies actually use Windows and MS Office. {...} Teach them what they need to know to get jobs.
Well, that's the number 1 troll response that people get when they propose teaching with anything else but an exact replicate than what is currently in the workplace.
This is demonstrably bad for a couple of reason :
We're talking about a school. Not some preparatory training course for adults who will be in the workplace within 6 months. But teaching given to 11-19 y.o., who won't be in the workplace before 5-15 years. That's a pretty long time in the computer world.
5 years is what separates several major revisions of softwares.
And in 15 years, the landscape can change beyond recognition. 15 years ago Microsoft wasn't even such a big player in the office field.
So in short, chances are very high that the software with which you teach kids today, and what they will encounter 5 to 15 years from now in the marketplace will share little in common.
Therefor it matters little *what* software you teach them to use.
See how skills under MS-Office 2003 map well with the new MS-Office 2007, and try to imagine how they could even remotely help some future MSO 2012 or MSO 2022 (if microsoft is still around by then and office suite are still used the same way).
The only useful skill that can be taught today to the future is to be at ease with computers in general, and general knowledge about office softwares, etc...
this could be done with any software at hand, and there are some good reasons to pick Linux and OOo.
Mainly financial and legal ones :
- the licensing will be cheaper for the school as OSS is free, whereas MSDNAA requires a tax based on school population.
- also it will be easier and legal for the students to obtain free copies to use at home.
(for example MSDNAA doesn't offer home license for MSO for students, only for teachers, whereas OSS is available for downloading for free).
Currently, if a students wants to use the same software at home, either she/he has to shell out over a hundred buck (cheaper than the normal version, but still not an easy amount of money) or she/he has to p2p-download it from some shady website, putting the family at legal risk and the computer at security risk.
Also other minor reasons :
- teaching diversity : showing that there's more than only Microsoft might help spring more diversity in the corporate world.
Current adults have grown up with a very diverse computing world in their childhood years with lots of different compagnies producing home microcomputers (Apple, Atari, Amiga, etc...) and an incredible lot of varied software solution.
Whereas, current children and youngs have grown up in a world where there has been few thing on computers beside Windows and other microsoft branded software. Showing an inherently diverse world like Linux and OSS might help.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]