Education News

Free Software in Education

Today, many students and schools don't even know about Free Software or the great advantages it brings. At the same time, software knowledgeability is required for more and more tasks, and Free Software has a distinct advantage in this field. If you are one of those kept in the dark until now, please read some of the informational material we've put together here.

9000 PCs in Swiss schools going Linux only

From the Switzerland’s Department of Public Instruction, whose motto is “Long Live Free Software.”

Ubuntu breathes new life into school's abandoned hardware

Repurposed PCs use Kubuntu to run school's Web based student library system

School districts serve up lessons in Linux

School districts in the US and Canada find Linux and open source offers better support, cheaper setup costs, and improved educational value

OpenOffice.org Textbook Released Under CC and GNU Licenses

Gabriel Gurley (http://www.gabrielgurley.com), author of A Conceptual Guide to OpenOffice.org 2 for Windows and Linux, announces today the release of his book under the Creative Commons-ShareAlike 3.0 and GNU Free Documentation licenses.

A Conceptual Guide to OpenOffice.org 2 for Windows and Linux is an indepth guide to assist individuals, students and educators with learning the four core applications bundled in the open source office productivity suite. Unique to this guide is its ten hands-on lessons that walk users step-by-step through the creation of various documents.

Report Predicts Increase in Spending by Schools on Open Source SW

CIO.com and T.H.E. Journal both have reported on a new report published by DataMonitor predicting that school spending on open source SW will rise to $489M from $286M by 2012. The articles include discussion on Blackboard and OLPC. Seems the majority of the spending will occur in the operating system and support arena. This is actually very good because it indicates that support mechanisms for open source SW in K-12 are growing and that only means that confidence in the viability of open source SW will increase.

XO-LiveCD to support the OLPC project

The developers from German Skolelinux project have announced the availability of initial version of OLPC XO-LiveCD.

First KDE Education Project Meeting a Great Success

Last weekend members of the KDE-Edu team met in Paris for a meeting about the KDE Education project. Members got to know each other and started vivid discussions about their free and open source educational applications, life in general, as well as the future and vision of the Educational module, which is part of the KDE desktop project. Read on for a full report from the meeting.

North, South Korea Unite Over Linux

From BusinessWeek: The bitter political foes will team with China on the project, tentatively named "Hana Linux"

Linux Makes the Grade

The often-misunderstood technology (thought of as "just free Web 2.0 stuff" by the uniformed) has been the answer in Indiana—and a growing number of school systems across the country—to shrinking school technology budgets and soaring software costs.