[school-discuss] Re: M$ Windows 7 - probably didn't brag enough about FOSS

[Marilyn Hagle <marilyn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

After reading William's post I thought I did not brag enough about FOSS.

It is now over 11 years that I have been using Linux in the classroom.  As a
teacher, I can get any type of software I want.  The term "smorgasborg" comes
to mind.  I can pretty much do any crazy thing I can imagine.

Even now, FOSS is saving me and making cool things happen for my school kids. 
For many odd reasons the computers in my lab have nothing on the hard drives
yet.  However, it does not feel that way because we are booting to the Musix
live DVD. 

The BCIS kids having been practicing keyboarding with Ktouch, Gtypist, and out
of their text books.  I create my own tests each week easily by modifying a
Gtypist file.  Tomorrow we are going to have fun by making percussion sound
tracks in Hydrogen.

The animation students are creating stop motion videos with the Gimp, Audacity,
Kino, and Cinelerra.  They save their work on their flash drives or use Gftp to
upload it to the server in my room running Fedora.

Nothing is that hard to do - I am only an old music teacher after all.  All I do
when I am stuck is google it, or ask all of you guys on this list.

My colleagues using Windows are waiting 15 minutes to boot up and 10 minutes to
get into their new typing tutor program.

Free and Open Source Software makes all the difference.

Marilyn

Quoting William Fragakis <william@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:

> Tim,
> Respectfully, your comments make it appear that you are unaware of some
> very powerful FOSS tools. I began using an excellent FOSS project,
> k12ltsp, back in 2005 and it kicked the pants off anything that was
> commercially available then or now. Our experience encouraged an entire
> major metropolitan school district to move to FOSS computing for the
> students because the upgrade costs otherwise would have broken the bank.
> 
> We paid nothing in licensing. We've upgraded software almost every year.
> Upgrade licensing costs? Nothing. Why upgrade so frequently? We can give
> our users the most current desktop  experience possible - from simple
> things like multiple workspaces to the latest eye candy. 
> 
> We had so many software tools at our disposal for the first time,
> teachers were almost in disbelief: language, math, science, geography,
> graphic arts, etc. Even if Microsoft is making things cheaper for you,
> you are still paying Adobe, etc. for their creativity programs and
> others for things like typing tutors, and other educational software.
> And, you are likely paying for antivirus (unless you are using something
> like Clamwin, and how ironic it would be to use a FOSS tool to secure
> Windows.) 
> 
> We've been able to manage, control and upgrade hundreds of desktops
> painlessly and remotely. We only had to be physically there when
> somebody kicked a connection loose. To assert that FOSS tools can't
> control a desktop with a few mouse clicks, again, illustrates an
> unawareness of FOSS tools. Please let me know an affordable alternative
> to FL_TeacherTool, which can not only control, monitor and share
> desktops but distribute documents, launch applications and log off
> misbehaving students. A teacher can have every desktop in her/his
> classroom launch a browser to a specific url with not much more than
> typing 'firefox' and the address. What low cost Windows tool do you use
> to do the same? 
> 
> To say, OO can't compete is silly in the education space. 1) It's a
> recognized international (ISO) standard 2) I have yet to have a student
> find an incompatibility or issue 3) As others mentioned, it's absolutely
> cruel to give a student software at school that they can't afford at
> home. 
> In an evolving era of the networked desktop (ie Google Apps), thinking
> that kids need to learn only Microsoft Office is very near-sighted. If
> you don't believe me, think of how many jobs one can get these days by
> being an expert in WordPerfect? Microsoft Word couldn't compete with it
> up until the mid 90's. To paraphrase your comment: We can extend
> OpenOffice to _every_ teacher, student and family - for free. 
> 
> Any techie worth his salary can write whatever scripting you may need.
> I'm not a techie and I've scripted for both Linux and Windows. If your
> techies can't script, I'd assert they aren't qualified. Why script? You
> can do elegant things specifically for your needs. If you don't want to
> script, there are tons of great GUI tools. We used WebAdmin, but there
> are many others that allow computer, server and network administration
> without the need for CLI. To use this argument to other system admins,
> isn't - to say politely - very powerful. 
> 
> To claim that a Windows admin can manage more desktops than a Linux
> admin isn't supported by either anecdote or independent research. (And I
> stress the word independent, here.) 
> 
> If Microsoft is working for you, great. But many of your comments,
> though well intentioned, simply do not reflect a) the experience of many
> system administrators on this list and b) an accurate appraisal of FOSS
> management tools.
> 
> Regards,
> William Fragakis
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, 2009-09-15 at 21:17 -0700, Tim Dressel wrote:
> snip 
> > To put things in perspective, we pay $14,000 per year in MS licensing.
> > For this we get a site license of Office, Windows, Forefront, and
> > every CAL under the sun. For us it works out to about $14/year per
> > workstation. For this I have two full time techs that can completely
> > hands off manage the entire network in 12 physical locations. Doing
> > something similar in Linux land would take more bodies, but yes would
> > be less expensive. I can extend WAHR to my teachers for Office 2007
> > Enterprise for $16.25 delivered. OpenOffice just can't compete, and
> > there is no combination of FLOSS tools that give me the same amount of
> > control over my desktops with not much more than a few clicks of the
> > mouse. I didn't have to write complex batch files, or perl myself
> > silly.
> > 
> [snip] 
> > Respectfully,
> > 
> > Tim
> > 
> > 
> > On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 10:41 AM, Joel Kahn <jj2kk4@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > Here's a recent article on the latest
> > > fun & games from you-know-who:
> > >more snip
> 
> 


:)