BECTA was championing open source whiteboard software and had a project under way but I can't remember what it was called off the top of my head. Moodle is becoming quite popular as a VLE but doesn't have much support in the schools IT support business, which is dominated by RM, who are very much a Microsoft house these days.
A lot might depend on how school management goes on. I can see that the IT budget might be decentralised. My partner works in a PFI school and has told me that the city infrastructure provider has doubled their intranet bill this year, so there might be space to shop around for savings in future. Office tools are fairly standard though and I can't see MSOffice being replaced by OpenOffice or similar any time in the future On 25 May 2010 00:03, "Mark Brocklehurst" <dragon-ri...@o2.co.uk> wrote: On 24/05/10 23:24, Chris Rowson wrote: > > >> Hi all, >> >> Just a thought I wanted to put to the li... Hi, I know I've not contributed to the list before, but I thought say a little something about this as I work as an IT Technician at a sixth form college. Not quite the same as a school, but would still look to someone like Becta for guidance at least. I have to admit to not knowing a lot of detail about certain things, however: Yes, a lot of schools use SIMS, but there are alternatives that do the same thing with varying success rates, and yes I believe they are expensive - my college are on at least their fourth alternative since leaving SIMS behind many years ago. Who's to say an Open Source alternative can't be created? The same goes for Interactive Whiteboards - I've not tried plugging one into my Linux box, but from a programmer's perspective, it's another peripheral with either serial or USB connectivity, the only problem really is the time it might take to write such software. As far as most software is concerned, the majority we use is proprietary, usually MS or Adobe. I believe this is mostly due to staff being afraid to try something new - the students do use alternatives like OpenOffice at home. There are a few teachers happy to use Open Source, but to try and persuade the entire college to do the same would prove difficult. Also, at college level I'm not sure what the situation might be with "computerised" exams where an examination board provides files to be used during the exam - from experience most such files are MS orientated, (eg. MS Databases). Having said that, with budgets being cut recently it may be give more weight to the Open Source alternative. I do agree that the support staff delivering IT solutions are the ones who drive a lot of what's used, but I think they should also listen to the requirements of the teachers themselves. Maybe teachers themselves should also be made more aware of the possibilities of Open Source. Mark. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
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