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- redhatcat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+24Good idea.
Unfortunately, this guy has never worked beside any real school district IT department. Most, not all, can bearly administer Windows. It's not exactly the IT cream of the crop in public education. Some have done it though I'll admit.
Here's to hoping. I want it to happen more often. - Firemeboy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+25It is interesting to me that the US spends more money per child than any other country. And yet when the child has graduated, they rank behind just about every other industrialized nation in math and science (http://nces.ed.gov/pubs98/twelfth/chap2.asp#Math-How%20Well).
We need to stop paying the bloated bureaucracy of administrators and policy makers, and send the money to where it makes more sense. Better teachers, better equipment, better resources. - Offill, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11Schools need serious planning. I go to school and dream of having a desk that is sturdy enough to hold my books. While I'm dreaming this I realize that every computer in my school has a dual format DVD burner and many have dual processors. If anything, the schools need better financial management, open source would nonetheless be a great place to start.
- unangst, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11Schools and the open source community have very similar missions (and budgets).
Many districts have been using open source for years as a way to save money. I have saved my district thousands of dollars with the use of OpenOffice.org, Joomla and other projects. Yes, Redmond offers a discount for their OS, but most vendors offer discounts to the education market whether it's software or hardware.
The key thing I tried to impress upon my students was that there is a great wealth of free information which can now be found online - things that will truely enhance their lives. Most of it is free, if you know how to look for it. And, there are increasingly free/open source options for them to explore. They were exposed to some great open source projects at the site I built, http://www.techkid.org.
~ A Technology Coordinator from an Ohio school district. - lcohiomatty86, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8it will be hard to save money when microsoft offers these schools such amazing prices for using their software (extremely cheap or free i believe)
i remember a few years ago getting a FREE copy of visual studio 6 professional from the school that microsoft was offereing to programming students. - TruthElixirX, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8I tried convincing my school ot go with some open source stuff (Open Office, Firefox, etc) and it was a no go.
1)If it was broke, they had no one to yell at except the actual person who broke it.
2) The concept of free software, that actually works, blew their mind. "Its free?" "Yeah." "Why?" "*insert explanation of open source ideas*" "It doesn't make any sense though. It isn't profitable!" *repeat this loop 50 times*. - Sp1k3d, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Because we all know Linux has more downtime and therefore more support calls than Windows.
It sounds like you've been reading from Microsoft's "Get the facts(fiction)" ad campaign - TheWorkz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8I agree with you 100%.. Microsoft OS and Office licensing costs are not the REAL problem with schools.. I have seen children with Downs Syndrome that have better money management skills than our local "Portland Public Schools".
- TheG2, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8Compared to the time used when configuring a distro and teaching the students, that money is nothing.
- Gatesophile, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Gah sorry, forgot something I wanted to add:
my district is REALLY trying to save money, and the ways they are doing it ight now are lowering the temperature of the school by 2 degrees (during the winter), and being "Paper-Nazis" by not letting us use too much paper. Open source would've really helped, but whatever. - geekee, on 10/12/2007, -6/+11Teachers unions are making damn sure you get a good paying job for life whether or not you're any good. That's part of the problem.
- affanjam, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6My school started to use Open Office because they couldn't afford to buy Microsoft Office Licenses
- NathanBalon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5There may be configuration files but that is one thing that make Linux easier to administer. If there is a problem with an application in Linux you can make some modifications to the configuration file and fix it. In the case of Windows, it places information all over the place. I would rather edit a config file then mess around with the Window's registry. Also, if you have a miss place character in the registry it has the same effect.
- unangst, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Kids love Linux. It's just unfortunately that 99.9% of them never get to try it. My students used 'Mandrake Move' several years ago and loved it.
- rahmza, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Compared to the time administering each individual computer, a Linux terminal server saves tons of time and effort. Read up on the LTSP and tell me how this is not a better option for the needs of most school systems.
- kandiil, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4The school I'm at run Linux and open source in all the English rooms. Indiana has a program they are pushing to put Linux computers in every classroom
http://www.doe.state.in.us/INaccess/about_inaccess.html - Pendragon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Older pentium 4's dang I would love that in my school computers right now we have the crappiest oldest Celerons money can buy. Window's 95 crashes. and I moved from a school district that was still using Apple II's
- TheAttacks, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I don't think they mean Operating Systems in general, just using Open Source software server side or just using OSS like OpenOffice and such.
- cphuntington97, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4geekee, what are you going to asses your teachers on? Student performance? If so, that's a strong disincentive for teachers to work in lower income level areas - the sort of places that may need the best teachers the most. Ultimately, the only thing you can really judge a teacher on is "did they follow our procedures and policies?"
School budgets work just like any other government budget - you get a certain amount of money to do a certain thing at a certain time. If, when that time is up, the money is not gone, then the budget is reduced to however much was spent on that one thing, at that one time, during that one year. This kind of policy results in things like math departments taking a trip to the zoo at the end of the year - just to burn off the rest of the budget. If they don't burn it off, they will not have those funds next year, and perhaps the student population goes up, or new equipment is needed, or otherwise the money will be needed. People aren't greedy - they're just trying to make sure the funds they need to do their job well are going to be available when they're needed. The thing about budgets is - it's almost impossible to get more money.
At the school I worked at, the boss would make an impromptu appearance one day at lunch and end with - "oh and by the way - all of your budgets are empty." What happened is the school ran over budget it certain areas; so they took the money out of everyone else's accounts to balance the books. This causes everyone to spend their money even MORE recklessly, since while you know for sure it's going to be gone at the end of the year, it might be gone ever SOONER than you expect - and you never really know when.
Another thing at this school was a huge crackdown on the number of photocopies - supposedly this was a huge expense that needed to be cut back. I did the math and found out the number of copies we were making (supposedly WAY too many) worked out to 1 copy per student per class per day. That doesn't sound at all unreasonable to me and yet it was a big sticking point in the budget.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't cut back where you can, but you have to be smart about it. Ultimately, student achievement is not going to be too related to the amount of money spent. Once the basics are covered - safe, habitable environment, necessary supplies, - learning is up to the school culture which is made of the dedications and interests of the students and educators.
My personal take, as a professional educator? Education should not be a profession. People learn all the time in everything they do. Children need significant amounts of meaningful one-on-one time with adults in their community. Children should be permitted to seek assistance if they request it, but otherwise the children should decide what, when, and how to learn. This is the only way meaningful learning can take place, and the resentment caused by the current public schooling institution does more harm than good.
While homeschooling is best, otherwise check out http://www.sudburynetwork.org/ - NathanBalon, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6Linux is not harder to trouble shoot than Windows. The schools may have to retrain their administrators or hire new ones, but it is a lot easier to keep a Linux box running than an XP box.
I think it would also be better for the students to learn Linux. They would actually learn more about the concepts of computing, instead of having everything hidden behind a GUI. As for the argument that most of the world uses Windows, so the students should also I don't find this argument valid. I think good open source software will outlive any of MS products. In the future, I think more companies will move to Linux and the younger generation will be trained for it. I am already starting to see a shift from Windows to Linux. - Gatesophile, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5My school uses Macs, and I made a speech about how they should switch to open source. It made an impression on my teacher, but I'm sure it didn't hinder our IT department any.
- TheAttacks, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5I talked to the IT guy at my school and they do get a discount, but they still pay. For a school with hundreds of PCs, $20 a license is a whole lot.
- zmigliozzi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3ya too bad everyone is too dumb to understand that concept and everyone is stuck on the huge microsoft pull that they somehow.... Open Office works the same and wait... its free... go save a couple grand on licensing and go opensource... Ya its a shame most school IT's are on their knees for microsoft.
- mistercranky, on 10/12/2007, -0/+31. Start a company that sells OSS software and support to schools at a slightly higher price than Microsoft.
2. Admins think it must be better if it costs more.
3. Profit. - bobothn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I just one to say one thing i have worked with 2 different school districts on there PC they both use dell's preinstalled with windows xp and office. they get those cheap as hell. the first school district tho when fully proprietary on there back end spending 10k or more per program to administer their network the other went fully open source . they both have roughly the same amount of PC but the open source school is able to spend more money on bandwidth because they don't have to keep updating service contracts and such for the software. and they actually have less tech guys then the proprietary school district. open source rox
- cakefart, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Ugh, that article wasn't terribly enlightening.
I worked on a project in 2002 & 2003, where one of the objectives involved migrating the educational district from Oracle on Sun & HP/UX to generic 1U Intel servers running RHEL. The licensing savings alone were in excess of $300,000/annum. The ESD also acted as webserver/DNS for almost every rural school in the state.
The program had other objectives as well, which were unfortunately cut when the state had a "budget crisis" and couldn't afford to save that much money, although Intel and the Gates Foundation were willing to foot the bill for 70% of the training and startup costs. (Yes, Bill Gates.)
OSS works well in schools, especially K12- anyone else who might be interested in introducing it into their local districts should take a look at: http://www.k12ltsp.org/ - Pendragon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2It's happening already. My teacher couldn't figure out why Powerpoint kept crashing when she had 19 IE windows open 3 word windows and 2 excel windows on a box with 256 mb of ram. Then she called in the Computer teacher for the school and she couldn't figure out the problem
- mancat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Open Source doesn't always fit in to the way school districts handle licensing agreements. I was a fresh HS graduate that had been working in my former school district's IT department for a little over a year, and I was always looking for ways to incorporate open source software to lower costs and improve the district's infrastructure. Here's an example for you: In the district that I worked in, we had a single T3 line for use by the entire district, and this was split into separate lower bandwidth links for each building in the district to form the district WAN. A fair amount of bandwidth on the WAN was being sapped away by DNS requests and HTTP to a number of frequently used sites. This really killed our transfer speeds between buildings, as each building only had the equivalent of a T1 line (1.54Mbit/s) for data transfer, this being in the early 2000's. To help alleviate our bandwidh issues, over the summer in my free time I grabbed a number of older desktops that were not in use, installed the largest disks that we could afford with our limited budget, and some additional memory. I used NetBSD with Squid and TinyDNS to cache all outgoing DNS requests, and HTTP requests of a limited size. The solution worked great, and cut overall bandwidth usage of each building's data line on an average of 20 percent. Plus it cost us nothing more than the additional hardware.
A few months later, the bean counters came. The district's financial department had made an agreement with Microsoft that stipulated that we would be using ONLY Microsoft operating systems, and in return we would be offered a healthy discount. I doubt it was really that great of a discount, but until you've seen how school districts handle their money, you've never seen a true group of "penny pinchers" in action. Of course, the IT department was never even told of this. We just made requests for additional sets of licenses, and the financial department would handle that sort of thing.
Anyway, when it finally all came together, I was forced to rip out all of the servers that I had put into place, bringing our WAN back to a crawl, and making staff and students generally miserable - all to save a few bucks on Windows site licenses.
Now I know that many school districts are in this style of agreement with Microsoft. Some of you might be in a computer class where you play with Linux, and your school may even use Linux in the district, but don't be surprised if they're keeping it on the DL. I worked for one other district after that one, and they also were in a similar agreement. I've been out of the school IT scene for a few years, but I can only imagine that more and more districts have been enticed by Microsoft to enter into this agreement, since open source software has really begun to cut into their server market share.
Even if open source software is a great answer, it's not always possible to use it in school districts. - herrshuster, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5As a wise woman I once knew said...
"Americans are educated the least and have bloated egos. North Koreans know the most and think they're worthless"
Stop making kids feel good and spend billions and teach them!
I'm homeschooled - Indrek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Fundamentally wrong. If schools want to save money, they need free (as opposed to commercial) software. Whether the source is open or closed has nothing to do with this, save for the fact that open-source software automatically comes with a price tag of zero.
- ChadK, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2One of my clients (a private Christian School if that makes a difference...no board, all decisions are those of the various staff/committees), runs mostly open source.
Before I took it over 3 years ago it was a bit gross, dial up Internet proxy on windows 98...with a redhat 9 file server running squid (I couldn't get why they didn't just dial with the RH server, but maybe the admin just didn't know how?)
Anyway now it has a Samba 3 domain (using Gentoo Linux) all students are using Windows 2000 clients (Free through this educational program for recycling lic. or some such thing) with OpenOffice as there office suite. The secretary is the only one who uses Office, and that's just because she deals with outside people a lot and is very particular about her formatting matching what she sends and receives.
The router we use is an old box running ipcop hooked up to the DSL connection. The box has died 3 times, we get donated computers and when it dies I just run over and use the floppy configuration to get everything reinstalled. A lot of the time a hard drive swap works just fine.
All in all the school pays my company for the maintenance and monitoring, we work with one person on site who administers things and sets up new user accounts with the lovely interactive and batch scripts we setup.
Total cost for software is only on the educational software the school uses, I tried getting them to go Linux on the desktop but they try to maintain standards with other Christian schools and I find emulating everything counter-productive.
I've been meaning to write an article on exactly how we did the setup, but it is a topic (setting up samba 3 as a domain) that has been beaten to death...and then kicked a few more times.
FYI I wouldn't use Gentoo if I did it again, instead I'd use Centos most likely...I've had a few things I wanted to do (such as setup scalix) that gentoo makes unnecessarily hard to do and a more standard enterprise distribution would of fit the bill better over the long term. - bruce89, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2It can be changed you know. That particular wallpaper is not the default one anyway. The default one is the one with the map of the world.
- spyres, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2As opposed to MS who will send a tech out to fix every little problem for you at the drop of a hat right?
- michaelschmitt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Very little information in the article. The sad thing is, school districts and the school site councils (which include parents) buy lots of computers to get good student to computer ratios. Unfortunately, these computers include very little software to make them useful to students in the classroom. Word pad? Come on. It's like buying someone a nice car but giving them no fuel to drive it. Look at all these computers! Uh, what can we do with them?
The one program our district is in love with is Accelerated Reader, so everyone gets a network install. That's it, other than anti-virus installations. So kids can take reading quizzes. Cool, but not enough to even meet our own technology standards.
Why knock open source? It gives kids tools they otherwise would not have. Support? Who cares? Software without support is better than no software at all. What's the worst that could happen? A kid could actually create something on the computer?
Lighten up on open source. It is awesome for schools, if only the bureaucrats running the districts can see that.
http://schmittweb.tripod.com/schmittweb/Software.html
Yes, I know. Not all "open source", but most of it is.
By the way, all the free web applications are great, too. Thank you to all who contribute to these efforts. - maccam94, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2My school has about 700 computers in the district. All of which are the same model HP business model desktop PCs. All are loaded with DeepFreeze, and the Explorer shell is locked down. Unfortunately, there is no way for the antivirus program to update its definitions due to DeepFreeze, and the email and attendance system always crashes. Many, many websites that are very good and useful are blocked, and email and such is not allowed.
There is one IT guy. The overzealous restrictions are explained away as being necessary due to the small amount of available manpower. It shouldn't be like this.
I think deploying Ubuntu 6.06 would be in the best interests of the district. The facts that it is so easy to use, and that applications like OpenOffice make Windows users feel at home, are huge pluses. In addition, the unix style permissions system means applications like Deepfreeze are unncecessary, as is locking down the shell. Instead of having a few inefficient file servers, and leaving the 700 odd machines with no networkable storage, students' home directories could simply be stored on a central file server, and easily be shared for projects by simply adjusting the file permissions. The only hitch i can see with this plan are those of spending the time to deploy the software and making OpenOffice default to Microsoft formats. Still, these should not be major obstacles. Open source strategies such as this would be very helpful to schools, both reducing maintenance AND upgrade costs. - mike2312, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Well my school first needs to get rid of its Apple II/Gs's and Macintosh (originals)
- benplaut, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2At my school, a few friends and I have set up a 15 computer LTSP system with 5 clients to each of the 3 gateways that the school survives on. They run internet and office _faster_ than their standalone friends.
Next task: Teaching the sysadmin how to manage the monster when we're gone ;) - Anchoret, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Educating people (who presumably expect to be getting viable employment skills) in market-marginal applications and operating systems is a great disservice.
- idig, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I agree - until we start paying teachers (and the school IT support staff) well enough to attract the best professionals we are going to have a system that is mostly sub-par. By sub-par I mean people who only understand Windows (you know, the easy, wasteful solution). I taught AP Comp Sci for 5 years at a So Cal high school, and believe me, there's plenty of money. But we waste huge chunks of $$ on things like CALs to go with all our Windoze servers (Technically, you need one CAL for EVERY client that touches EVERY Windows server. This is how MS really sticks it to public schools.) SO BRING ON THE THIN CLIENTS AND THE LINUX BOXES!! We can do so much more with so much less!!
- Ericular, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I'm a one of several network administrators for a large school district. The largest problem with going entirely open source is support costs. The relatively low cost of providing Windows and MS Office is easily justified by the additional support costs that would be incurred from open source solutions. Even if you spend all your money assembling a team of Linux admins for the server side, you'll never be able to afford the Linux support it would take on the client-side.
Microsoft and Apple throw SEs and education reps at you the instant you hint at having trouble with anything. I can't imagine any kind of open source solution offering the same level of service.
The operational side of things simply doesn't have the same kind of software offerings and selection with open source either. Remember, every department has to remain functional with equivalent software to replace their current Windows solutions. Human Resources, Information Systems, Curriculum, Media Services, Facilities Management, Finance, Payroll, Assessment, Child Nutrition, Transportation, Health Services, and so on -- all without losing the support they currently have for those software suites. How is this possible?
If you're talking high school labs with Linux + Open Office, that's one thing. Entirely swapping out Windows for Linux & open source solutions... it's a much bigger task.
On paper, not having to pay for an OS or office suite makes perfect sense... but affording the staff to support it, and finding the right software (and related support) to replace everything that's currently working perfectly fine under Windows.... that's a tougher sell to a school board.
I'm all for it, don't get me wrong -- but I just don't want the schools getting a bad rap for "blatantly ignoring" this "obviously superior solution". - dankoleary, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4Saving money= great idea. But most government agencies are married to Microsoft.
- turbodigg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1ha ha my schools poor as sh*t and they just got a lot of money from a law suit and spent it all on new laptops (which they dont need because they had older pentum 4 computers, but the teachers only use them for word processing so the clockspeed doesnt matter) for the teachers, instead of cleaning up our pathetic campus. wonderful financial managment.
- rastan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Must be nice to be rich :)
- bobothn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1weird i cant edit any way i forgot to say the reason the one district is proprietary is because they recently received a grant to Barrie fiber between all the buildings and part of the grant was there were new rules about buying software that prevented them going open source.
- doolittle, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Open source in schools is an excellent idea - if there were budget cuts, I would much prefer MS software and licensing get the axe and not teachers or other support staff.
A migration is usually expensive initially, but after the deployment the savings are tenfold. A *good* administrator can now concentrate efforts on the operation of the network since license tracking goes away. - TruthElixirX, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2No, but my technology "teacher" can get on the phone and yell at them about why it isn't working.
- mogunus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Reconfiguring linux boxes is really easy. You can even do it remotely. Just launch a shell script that blows away all the "home" directories on each Linux box and creates new ones from the student lists or what have you. Or just one account per computer, with settings refreshed overnight. All the default settings will be restored, and there's no need to worry about spyware/virus comprimised systems. Because of the way that linux handles users and settings, and all of the remote admistration tools that come with it (well, ssh) it's really easy to manage a bunch of linux boxes remotely using some shell scripts. If reinstalls are necessary, partition image works great, and you don't need to sit through an install process. Partition images of linux actually work on other boxes, mind you. If you try to use an image of a windows system on a not-completely-identical box, it'll go all funky because of liscensing.
In closing, remotely manageing large flocks of linux systems is actually very easy, especially when you want to do things like refresh settings and manage (and by "manage" I mean "remove") user documents. Just do it once, and write down all the commands you use. Some editing of that text file, and shabam, you have a nice shell script that you can run on all the computers to do your repetative install/wiping tasks for you. Also free and no pesky viruses. - biometricks, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Microsoft doesn't give us anything for free, we only get a discount. On the other hand Apple gave us a free upgrade to OSX a few years ago and I don't think it's something they usually do... so I'm not claiming Mac is better than Windows. But that doesn't really matter... most of our money is wasted by using state contracts with vendors. School districts, at least in NJ, have a threshold of $20,000 or so-- if you purchase items above the threshold (like $20,000 worth of computers or printers) you either have to go out to bid or go with a vendor that already has a state contract. The bid process takes months to complete and is a pain in the ass, so we're almost forced to go with state contracts. Now you'd think by using the state contract would get the best price, or at least close to it, but unfortunately it ain't true. Example: Dell has a state contract, CDW does not.... guess who usually has the best prices... CDW by more than 10% most of the time.
It's a ***** up process that forces us to waste money. - anthonymel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I have been working at a mid size private school for 2 years now as there System Admin. I do everything there and have zero time to teach someone something new. Most public school districts have one guy for the entire district. I don't know how they do it. But I'm guessing if something doesn't work you will need to wait weeks for it to be fixed.
As far Windows goes. It comes on the highly discounted machine that I get from Dell. They practically give them away to schools. Better discounts then Apple. My dealings with MS comes with there Server OS. Licenses are about 150 each per server. CAL are like 9 dollars each. Most of my costs are hardware not software. Administrating XP machines is easy if you have the right software like SMS 2003. Of course it cost a little to get.
As far as problems go you get them with every system. Just back up your data. However I had a Windows servers run solid with no downtime other than updates for 2 years now. -
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