Michael Dolan Dot Com

Friday, April 4th, 2008

My old neighborhood featured in ComputerWorld for migrating its schools to Linux

I was so proud to see a city that I used to “hang out” in when in high school (usually at a batting cage, on a baseball field, or in a gym for pitchers-catchers practice – see a theme?) has begun deploying Linux PCs across its school district. I’m from the Cleveland, Ohio area originally and Brecksville-Broadview Heights is actually a very nice area so while budgets and schools may always seem to be in conflict, I have no doubt, B-BH’s school district is doing much better financially than others. If it makes sense in a city that could afford Windows, I’m sure it makes sense in many other school districts across the world. I’ll have to try meeting up with John next time I’m in town visiting.

I’m copying/pasting an usually large amount of text from ComputerWorld and recommend reading the entire article here:

http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2008/040108-school-districts-serve-up-lessons.html?page=3

Brecksville-Broadview Heights City School District opts for Eee PCs

John Schinker is the technology coordinator for the Brecksville-Broadview Heights City School District in Ohio, which is comprised of six schools serving some 4,800 students from kindergarten to grade 12.

Schinker oversees all aspects of technology for the district, including hardware, software, instructional applications and networking operations.

Schinker purchased eight Linux-based Eee PCs for the district: one for the technical staff, one for himself, and one for each school, with instructions to pass them around among students and staff to determine how they can fit into the district’s educational environment.

“For us, the price was the major selling factor. If we had gone with Windows, it would have increased the cost by about US$150 and the hardware would be underpowered. Even running XP SP2, we would need more RAM in them. Linux was really the way to go to keep the cost manageable,” Schinker said.

So what do the kids think of Linux compared to Windows?

“So far, it hasn’t been an issue. Other than the Eee PCs and most of our servers, we’re Windows only. But the Eee PC is so intuitive, it hasn’t been a problem. Our experience with the Eee PC has prompted us to look at using something like Linpus on our older desktop hardware too,” he said.

Schinker said one positive outcome from Linux is that it forces the district to limit the scope of the Eee PCs.

“By not running Windows, we can put some limits on the expectations of the little laptops. They’re not going to run Accelerated Reader, or Successmaker or Adobe CS. We can focus the expectations on the things that it does well rather than trying to make all of these other applications work, and that is really nice from a tech perspective.”

What the Linux Eee PC will do for the district is allow kids to access the Web, write essays and stories, collect and graph data, and prepare and deliver presentations.

“My own kids, ages 6 and 8, really like Tux Paint. They say it’s as good as or better than the commercial Kid Pix program.”

But Schinker doesn’t think it matters what OS kids use, as long as it is tailored to their educational needs.

“Certainly the user interface on the Eee PC is intuitive…but there are plenty of Windows front-ends that will do the same thing and are just as easy to use.

“I think the older kids will have concerns that aren’t focused on the OS per se; they’ll be more easily frustrated by the screen resolution and keyboard size than the younger kids, but I don’t think the OS is a concern for them,” he said.

With the education sector typically under funded, the low entry cost to open source has its appeal, Schinker said.

“On the server side, almost everything we use is open source. We run Linux servers with Apache, MySQL, PHP, WordPress, Moodle, Samba, Xmail, Dovecot, SquirrelMail, etc. In almost every case, we’ve been able to implement better technology for less money because of the availability of open source and open standards technologies.”

But the cost savings aren’t always worth the migration efforts.

On the desktop the district tends to use more proprietary software, such as MS Office which costs around US$60 per copy. While OpenOffice would be more economical, Schinker said it is not worth the compatibility issues a migration would result in.

“I do think we focus too much in education on the tools. There’s the argument that we should be using what the ‘real world’ uses to better prepare our students. I argue that we need to focus on teaching concepts rather than specific software applications. Those skills can then be applied to whatever software package they end up using,” he said.