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Re: [seul-edu] Progress on Linux in Portland Schools



Jeffrey B. Williams wrote:


I believe that the only way to have a viable computer science program in the
schools is to go open source.  So far, very few people agree, at least in
our school district.  I hope the parents will appreciate the increase in
quality with the cost savings.

jeff williams - cfiaime@nconnect.net
Actually Open Source has relatively more advantages for teaching CS (as opposed to Office Apps). Our Advanced Placement Computing curriculum calls for Java. With that in mind there are a number of really excellent Open Source development environments such as Eclipse, Netbeans, JGrasp, Bluej.

In contrast, teaching with MS technology requires Visual Studio .Net. We are members of the MS Academic Alliance (yes, I'm in bed with Bill but I don't really love hime :). VS .Net is 7 CD's and requires Windows 2000/XP. It's a major pain to distribute. The Java environments are easy.

--
Dr. Robert G. Rittenhouse, Chair
Department of Computer Science
McMurry University, Abilene, TX 79697-0968