[school-discuss] Geneva schools completely switch to Open Source

[Richard Andrews <bbmaj7@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

ref: http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7576/6008

CH: Geneva schools completely switch to Open Source
Open Source News - 24 April 2008 - Other European Countries - Deployments and
Migrations

About 70,000 students and their 7,000 teachers in the Geneva school district
will gradually be moving to Open Source.

The decision to move to Open Source was taken by the Geneva Public School
District (Département de l?Instruction Publique Genevois (DIP) in March 2006,
says Manuel Grandjean, project leader for the Geneva district's Open Source
migration. "The district wants Open Source software to become the default."

The migration to Open Source will begin after the next summer holiday with
three projects. One school, the Candolle College in Geneva, will try out a
complete Open Source desktop, using the GNU/Linux distribution Ubuntu. Next,
OpenOffice will be installed on the 9,000 PCs in the school district that are
used by teachers, replacing Microsoft Office. A third project is the migration
to OpenOffice on the PCs used by the boards of all primary school.

Replacing Microsoft Office by OpenOffice saves the state some 300,000 SFr
(about 186,000 euro) per year, says Grandjean. "Moving to a complete Open
Source system will cut the IT costs by a third."

The number of schools using GNU/Linux desktops will gradually be increased and
eventually all teachers will be supplied with laptops running Ubuntu GNU/Linux.
Grandjean expects the migration to be complete in three years time.

DIP's IT service department will configure the Ubuntu GNU/Linux system as an
option on all computers used for teaching (dual boot). Then, it will replace
proprietary applications one by one by Open Source alternatives. DIP is also
organising teacher training and is producing 10,000 copies of a DVD on the
project.

© European Communities 2008
Reproduction is authorised provided the source is acknowledged.

--
  Rich



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