[Novalug] Educational conversion from Windows to Linux

Kevin Cole dc.loco@gmail.com
Wed Oct 14 15:46:39 EDT 2009


On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 15:03, Kevin Cole <dc.loco@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 11:45, LinuxBodger <linuxbodger@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> My cousin is a principal in an out-of-state school system.  He would like to
>> investigate the possibilities of migrating their systems to Linux from
>> Windows.  They have not migrated from XP yet, but are looking at what
>> Windows 7 brings to the table.
>>
>> Are there published accounts of school systems doing this successfully?  I
>> would like to present him with accounts and successful solutions so any
>> suggestions would be appreciated.
>
> Hi,
>
> There have been quite a number of schools that have converted.  I'd
> say your best place to look for dry, policy-wonk papers would be the
> the InACCESS[0] project in Indiana, largely the result of Mike Huffman
> (formerly the IT director for the entire state's Department of
> Education, and now a partner at Schools4Tomorrow).
>
> Other places I'd look for papers:
>
> David Trask and company are responsible for the FOSSED conference[1] in Maine.
>
> Lots of FOSSED (Free and Open Source Software in Education) on the
> Ning Classroom 2.0 pages[2] and podcast, established by Steve
> Hargadon.  For the past few years, there has been an Open Source track
> at the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC)[3], also
> largely as a result of Steve's efforts.
>
> There is, of course, the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project[4], and
> close cousin Sugar Labs[5], based around Fedora Linux.  One of the
> Sugar Labs projects is Sugar on a Stick (SoaS), a bootable USB with
> the Sugar Learning Environment, so that teachers who already have
> hardware don't need an XO in order to benefit from the software. Other
> Sugar Labs projects include various ports and packagings (e.g. ongoing
> work in making it a nice Debian/Ubuntu package).
>
> Locally, (and on more of a classroom scale than a school-wide scale)
> there's Jeff Elkner, formerly at Yorktown High School in Arlington,
> now at the Arlington Career Center. There's an old article (2005) he
> had in Red Hat Magazine "From Teacher to Crusader: Confessions of an
> Open Source Educator"[6]
>
> Those are just off the top of my head.  I'm sure you could dig up
> quite a bit more.  Good Luck!

P.S. I forgot to mention Red Hat's efforts, and the various K12LTSP,
K12OS, K12Linux stuff going on...  See the new links at the bottom...

> References:
>
> 0. InACCESS
>   http://www.doe.in.gov/olt/InACCESS/
>
> 1. FOSSED conference
>   http://fossed.blogspot.com/
>   http://www.fossed.com/
>
> 2. Classroom 2.0
>    http://www.classroom20.com/
>
> 3. NECC
>   http://center.uoregon.edu/ISTE/2010/
>   http://www.neccning.org/group/neccunplugged
>
> 4. OLPC
>   http://laptop.org/ and http://wiki.laptop.org/
>
> 5. Sugar Labs
>   http://www.sugarlabs.org/ and http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/
>
> 6. From Teacher to Crusader: Confessions of an Open Source Educator
>   http://research.gallaudet.edu/~kjcole/CSJ/Elkner.pdf


http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/Main_Page
http://www.dlt.com/Brands/Red_Hat/Red_Hat_Higher_ED_and_K-12_Open_Source_Solutions/1736
http://k12ltsp.org/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page

-- 
Ubuntu Linux DC LoCo
Washington, DC
http://dc.ubuntu-us.org/



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