more to it than Office Apps
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| pinakidion Mar 21, 2007 6:09 AM EDT |
The main barrier is not the Office apps. There are tools and converters galore to overcome that hurdle. By the way, Open Text offers a commercial email system designed for schools with a linux client. (And it works well with all the features of the Windows and Mac clients.) The main barrier is all the educational software that comes as Windows or Mac only. There's Accelerated Reader, a big favorite. Fastt Math from Scholastic that's another. I'm not talking about the stuff you get in a retail store, but the big programs from education companies. Some of these have no equivalent in Linux at this point. Had I the money, I would develop these programs. I know there's Wine. That works for Accelerated Reader, but not Fastt math. It also doesn't work for a few other titles we have. If my school district had buy-in, we could help the Wine developers address these issues. As it is, first it has to be proven, then it can be implemented. Still, smaller school districts, like various Class I schools in Nebraska could go 100% F/OSS. They can't afford Fastt math or any of the other $250/client education programs out there. Gcompris, Kalzium, and many others are perfectly good programs and would be a wise allocation of money. (Frees up money for teacher incentive programs.) |
| Bob_Robertson Mar 21, 2007 7:13 AM EDT |
Chicken/Egg problem. Not enough Linux used in schools to justify the expense of writing the software to run on Linux. Not enough software that runs on Linux to justify the expense of installing Linux. I agree that the "educational" software available under Linux is very limited, at least what I can find. Oh, and lots of kids "educational" software that is shipping _right_now_ still has bugs in it so that it won't work cleanly with so-called "modern" memory management. I have to set my wife's WinXP machine to have a cache of only 200MB statically in order for the games to run, otherwise they crash and burn. And that's an application I bought last month! WINE can't run it, because WINE does "modern" memory management. Maybe I should try with WINE pretending to be Win95... As a home-schooler, I would be very interested in this "Fastt Math". Accelerated reading is irrelevant at this point, my 4 year old is reading at 3rd grade levels after I started with him reading last spring. |
| tuxchick Mar 21, 2007 2:41 PM EDT |
wow, however did kids learn anything before computers? |
| dinotrac Mar 21, 2007 5:00 PM EDT |
>wow, however did kids learn anything before computers? The real question is why they haven't learned anything since computers. |
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