On Monday 01 December 2003 22:06, Jez Rogers wrote:
ICT Support Officer wrote:
The bottom line is anyone coming over from the dark side WILL have to compromise or make a sacrifice to time in some areas. The world WOULD be a better place but then people should be allowed to choose. If they choose proprietary then so be it.
Just one little point here. At the end of the day, it is the tax payers money that schools are putting to good use (or more appropriately; wasting). I am a tax payer and it shames me to find that thousands of pounds are wasted on Propriety products in schools. That is why UK is such an expensive country to live in. Do school governors think that this money grows on trees. It's your money and my money they deduct from our salaries.
Whoa! As a chair of governors and an RHCE, I resent you assumption that governors are all in the Microsoft Camp. As our budget is extremely tight this year, I can assure that I am particulary aware of the financial situation.
Governors are charged with ensuring value for money whilst delivering an effective curriculum. Best value does not necessarily mean free, neither does it mean paid for. You can save money, effort or time, but never all three.
Switching away from Microsoft will typically involve time, effort and skills that teachers simply may not have, particulary if they are not full time IT teachers.
Governors don't, and should not, get involved with the nitty gritty of the curriculum contents, they are not qualified to do so. That's why they delegate this to the Head and staff. They can, of course, make sure that alternatives are known about.
I'd dearly love to kick our aging RM system into touch and replace it with something open source. Sadly I'm not aware of an OSS equivalent that'll do the job with the same level of automation, thereby allowing our hard pressed ICT coordinator to concentrate on teaching, not hardware/software maintenance.
There's a market for someone, somewhere.
I'll advise you for free. I am an ICT co-ordinator with a full teaching load and i support 90 workstations running Linux as thin clients and I have a life outside school. Once set up my system just works and thats it. I'll come to you if you want. regards garry
-- jez
Our capacity for understanding is inversely proportional to how much we think we know. The more I know, the more I know I don't know . . .
mailto:jez@jezndi.org