Hi. I'm the Deputy Headteacher at a UK Junior school (ages 7-11). I am intentionally asking these questions from a school management and teaching perspective. These comments apply as my experience of the Primary education system in the UK (5-11 year olds). On 8 Aug 2007, at 13:10, James Tremblay wrote:
In education a "vertical solution" could be defined as a set of software pieces that encompass all of the tasks an Educator is confronted with daily, i.e. a teacher needs an attendance module,
We use SIMS (Capita) for attendance. We have no reason to change. The cost (yes financial, but more importantly the cost in time of the teachers learning to take a register) of retraining outweighs the cost of 8 classroom computer clients and an office SIMS server.
grading module,
What does this actually do? For senior management? For teacher? For pupil? It's just a place to store and analyse progress data, right? We are provided with tools for this that have little or no cost to the school.
course management,
What does this do for me as a Primary teacher?
reference materials management
A what? A shared library of resources across teachers across a school? Accessible from anywhere?
and reporting\assessment module, etc.
What's the difference between this and a "grading module"? My experience of a report module is a report writing assistant tool. At a Primary level these can be as much of a bind as a help.
A school needs a desktop OS, server OS, web applications, e-mail, firewall, etc.
Our email services and firewalling is provided at a County level at no additional cost to the school if we use it or not. Every child and teacher receives a free email account (web-based and pop) and support is at no cost to the school. County have also bought into a "Learning Platform", which if we take it up, is at no cost to the school. The "LP" is a term that is being used here to define a web-based interface to shared school calendaring, file storage, a news portal, resource/room management, attendance etc. ---- I am a very enthusiastic advocate of OSS. I have installed linux servers and desktops, and installed OpenOffice, Firefox etc, migrated schools websites to Plone etc, in schools for 10 years. But at a UK Primary school level (5-11) a lot of the service decisions are taken at a County level, and purchased at a County level. I can't abide SIMS, but it's functional for the limited use we put its way, and it's supported remotely at a very reasonable rate by the County. I don't like the company that provide our email service (negotiated at a County level), but the service is fine, free at the point of use, and well supported. I don't like the company that provide our connectivity or webhosting (negotiated at a County level) - but the service and support are very good. The problem for us is that schools have very little financial or functional reason to implement change on the services/products outlined above. Perhaps this is vastly different across the globe... perhaps we could hear some examples. Certainly for me, the work must be done above school level in order to affect change on the vast majority of the services outlined. Kind regards. -- Matt Johnson -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-edu+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-edu+help@opensuse.org