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Re: [school-discuss] FOSS Professional development courses for teachers



Yup. LAN only. It's the auto-sync of shared document changes that seems to be the key selling point.

I would go for XMPP/jabber-based apps.

----- Original Message ----
From: Peter Ruwoldt <ruwoldtp@xxxxxxxxx>
To: schoolforge-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Sunday, 17 February, 2008 9:43:03 AM
Subject: Re: [school-discuss] FOSS Professional development courses for teachers

I might be missing the point with Groove but it appears to offer little more than a wiki does.  Will they be setting this up so that it is only available within their LAN?  They will have all of the overheads with this - maintaining the thing.  If they were to use wikispaces, it provides a good UI and can be made private to the class/group and be access as easily from home as school without the maintenance costs.


Another possibility is that Google Apps are free to schools.  http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/editions_spe.html
No software maintenance costs, no server costs, accessible from everywhere, .............

Seems a bit stupid given the ever tightening education budgets but I temper that with only a simple overview of what Groove has to offer.

Peter


On 16/02/2008, Richard Andrews <bbmaj7@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I think your experience makes sense. My reason for starting this investigation is that my son has just started school and his school is rolling out MS Groove to all students on Intel UMPCs. Basic reaserch on Groove shows it to be a horrible vendor lock-in tool. The reason for the app choice, however, lines up with your experiences. The main driver for Groove seems to be to allow peer-to-peer learning and collaboration. Unfortunately I think the school has been sold a dud: reports I have seen show that Groove grinds to a halt if the number of devices on the LAN grows much beyond 20. The school has ~350 kids.



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