Hello All Just my opinion
On 24/12/06, Jonathan Lees <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The problem will never be resolved if non teachers can't see it from the teachers point of view, managing a class of 31 students all with different abilities working at different paces and keeping to government guidelines as to what they should be taught and get them through SATS tests in ICT too. With no OO resources for teachers how can they be expected to teach it?
I have faced a similar situation in my previous employment. I worked for a firm of stockbrokers and we tried to wen everybody off of msoffice and onto OO We would love to use Open Source in our school. On the server side I use as
much as I can and all of it has been self taught, I would love to replace my AD server but do not have the experience to use openLdap, it is very easy to get support in MS networking, I get tons of calls offering me support contracts, but how many support Open Source? To date I have found one, and they suggested to use Novell e-directory! I once asked Redhat to help out at our school to build us a Linux network, we would then demonstrate to all schools in our region, all they could offer was to send engineers at a high cost and provide us with expensive training.
As far as my solution was concerned I used ubuntu for our proxy server and our DNS and DHCP servers. I unfortunately did not get a chance to look at the replacement for AD but I found the fedora directory server project http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/ Looks like it maybe a reasonable replacement
On the desktop, I'd love to use Ubuntu or some other Linux, but we have too many educational apps that solely run on Windows and there are only two of us managing a network of 360 PC's and over 1000 users, hence little time for testing and research. I believe that we cannot ignore Linux, currently 2% of are students use it at home but I believe this will grow. I like using Linux, but I should not impose my preferences on others. Surely students and teachers should be given a choice on what OS / Office app they want to use? Why not build a solution that gives this choice?
As far as applications and desktop go, we provided all of our applications via Citrix. While you do have the initial expense of the software and licenses you make life so much easier as almost all the administration now takes place on the servers and you just roll out an automated install of fedora and install the citrix client on each desktop. The main savings are the time taken in admin and the longer life span of the desktops as all they have to run is the citrix client the will run on a slower processor and much less ram. Savings on software such as av software on each desktop is also quite considerable (just use clamav). Robin
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