My desire to create the EDU-CD is and has been to build a tool set that an emerging school or a school in the beginning stages of modernizing their infrastructure or a school that needs to shed it's licensing costs could in fact choose to either employ all of the "vertical solution" from openSUSE\Novell or pick and choose components, If you've read the http://en.opensuse.org/Education page and the pages linked to from it, the idea I propose is to include the core tools to build and manage a school or school district in as easy a form to install and manage as possible considering the multitude of science\math teachers forced to do my job. I never say anything about imposing any form of curricula restriction on that school, the offering is merely meant to eliminate the raping most school budgets suffer from companies like Pearson digital (which owns SASI XP , Powerschool and Chancery SMS) who license software to schools on a per student model that frequently have double digit costs. In my state those products average 28.00$ US per student and Microsoft only cuts deals with the savviest of technology directors, otherwise an MS server is 1000.00 $ US on average and each product still contains a need for its own CAL, again usually a two digit price tag and have repetitive "maintenance costs" . THIS IS OFFENSIVE! My school District saved over 20,000.00$ US by saying no to Pearson and using Centre\SIS. Having a formidable low cost infrastructure that can produce the necessary assessment and management tools gives that district a lot of freedom to pursue and finance a huge array of pedagogical avenues. My son goes to a "charter school" his school is outside the confines of my states Department of Education it is also outside its funding stream, however as a sophomore in high school he already has college credits in math and mechanical engineering all possible because the school uses OSS and redirects it's funding towards more modern methods of teaching as well as holding teachers accountable for there students progress and paying them appropriately for those achievements. I think giving the teachers the tools and incentives to succeed is even more important than creating a pedagogical guideline. Student scores and class achievements speak for the effectiveness of that teachers\schools skills and style. Forcing any guidelines on curricula or pedagogy only creates an atmosphere of a stagnant classroom that meets those goals and nothing more. The state of Massachusetts has a test it imposes on it's sophomores and has only produced an atmosphere were it's marginal students get taught just enough to pass this test and the other groups of students are forced to waste valuable classroom time reviewing information covered on this test rather than moving forward. A better assessment method in my opinion is a classroom level assessment of grade level expectations (i.e. can a second grader read and comprehend polysyllabic words or are they still reading "see spot run") Back to the point , the EDU-CD and the efforts of the community here are geared toward providing the tools teachers request in a format that is easy to install. -- James Tremblay Director of Technology Newmarket School District Newmarket,NH http://en.opensuse.org/Education "let's make a difference" -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-edu+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-edu+help@opensuse.org