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Re: [LUG] FOSS in schools (Was: Free ipad to every student????)

 

On 24/12/10 17:26, Philip Hudson wrote:
On 24 Dec, 2010, at 3:17 pm, Paul Sutton wrote:

unless we find a school or set of schools and
work with them with a common set of ideas / goals.

Have I got a school for you!

South Devon Steiner School, near Staverton. They do K-16 (kindergarten
to 16 yo). I'm a parent and just started to help out on a voluntary
basis with their IT. They have Ubuntu/LTSP infrastructure for staff &
admin, and are committed to FOSS. I'm currently researching FOSS
alternatives to the "standard" proprietary Windoze schools admin package
"SIMS" (written by Crapita) and to QuickBooks for them. They already
have most apps running on MySQL with OpenOffice.org Base front-ends,
some UDAs in OpenOffice.org Calc, and mail-merge using OO.o Writer; I'm
looking to move them away from Base into (most likely) Gambas, to give
us write-once-deploy-to-web-and-desktop.

They are applying for government funding as of next academic year, and
want to be a beacon of all kinds of alternative-ness, including
conscious, principled, consistent FOSS usage. They are alive to the
possibilities for establishing a suite of FOSS tools for UK education.

I seriously want to talk about this with whoever's interested at the LUG
meeting in Paignton on the 8th.

Small world, I believe Gordon is also involved with their admin office side of things.

Rob

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