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On 21/07/10 20:29, Paul Sutton wrote:
On 21/07/10 20:06, Rob Beard wrote:On 21/07/10 19:14, Roland Tarver wrote:On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 8:15 AM, Steve Lee<steve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:Miles Berry has put together a good list of ways to make the most of open source in educational settings. http://agent4change.net/grapevine/platform/645 Those of you have been around open source in education for a while will recognise the themes that Miles has collected together in a compelling article that deserves wide dissemination. Pass it on.Good one. passed on to my 348 friends on face book. haha. Best wishes.There's been a few critical comments about it on some forums... http://tinyurl.com/3ynhrlm In a way I'm wondering if these folks commenting are right. I recently had a tour of the new Torbay Community College site and spoke to the IT Manager there about what they have. They were slightly different from some schools, sure they had some RM stuff in there but they didn't go for the standard package from RM. Instead they had assistance installing some equipment from RM (wireless access points in every classroom) but they opted for their own solution on the desktops (Windows 7, Office 2007 I believe) and netbooks for each student. There was only two technicians at the school as far as I'm aware and an ICT Teacher who also taught other subjects. I gather that with close to 800 odd machines, possibly more the resources of the technicians are limited so maybe investigating and supporting FLOSS applications as a blanket replacement to Windows/Office etc would be a huge task requiring the help of someone like RM (who appear to be Microsoft only with their own proprietary junk on top) or maybe one of the other big players (Novell, IBM, Redhat?). It was promising to see that they ran a web based version of SIMS and a web based VLE (although not Moodle) but they'd need to manage these systems (they were saying that when a machine goes down they simply re-image it over the network and it does everything), they would need custom images building and tools to replicate what they already have (things like tools to lock down the machines, monitor screens and stuff). Okay this could possibly be done, but it's probably beyond the time and abilities of just two technicians who have to also support the staff and students in the school (currently around 1,000 people, possibly rising to 1,200 people). I'm not saying that it won't happen eventually, but maybe it would be easier with other schools who already haven't had the sort of investment that Torquay Community College have had (new building, all new machines etc). RobTorbay community college, where is that, or did you mean torquay community college Paul
Yeah, got Torbay Council and Torquay Community College mixed up :-) It's been a long day. Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq