Ubuntu in Education
Wow – I’ve already been amazed at learning about some of the great things happening with Ubuntu in Education. At every level, Ubuntu in schools and learning just makes sense. Yesterday I was pointed to this great map showing school deployments in Finland: http://bit.ly/amFiOO . Greece is right behind them and lots of schools in the US are reporting success using Ubuntu as well. The work is being done by both volunteers and Solution Providers.
The Andalusia deployment of over 200,000 systems is well documented and Amtron deploying 28,000 in Assam in northern India and Oxford Archaeology and Johns Hopikins and Oakland University and the list continues to grow. Next week I’m visiting a local school in my backyard of Houston, TX that has migrated to Ubuntu using Moodle and other open source SIS (Student Information Systems). The project lead is also the volunteer coordinator of the Moodle Core Contrib team. I had to travel out of town to meet him and learn about this great project. I’m really glad I did!
Next up, the Edubuntu team is still being driven by the unstoppable Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) and everyone is welcome to stop into #edubuntu and join the weekly meetings on Tuesdays to add your voice.
Who am I? I’m Dinda! I came into the world of open source and Ubuntu some five years ago b/c of my interests in Education and all things learning. You might have seen me around various projects but now I’ve taken on the temporary role of looking at everything related to “Ubuntu in Education” and creating some materials to help anyone who wants to use Ubuntu for learning. Are you a student? parent? educator? Sys Admin or IT staff at a school/University? Voter? Decision maker or Service/Solution Provider? What do you need to make Ubuntu a success in your school? Email me or add your comments here.
Dinda's Foss Blog 
Hi Dinda,
I’m the CTO of and Project Manager.
Here are some resources I think may help you:
Those are some of the resources we collect and/or develop to deploy Guadalinex Edu (educational Ubuntu derivative) to our large users base.
I expect to hear from you soon.
AJ
September 2, 2010 at 5:08 pm
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Ubuntu in Education « Dinda's Foss Blog
September 2, 2010 at 6:14 pm
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Education technology misses mark
September 3, 2010 at 7:30 am
I work for a higher education institution. I think the major issue of making the switch from MS Windows to Ubuntu is integrating Ubuntu into an existing MS network. Likewise is a great tool to allow active directory integration, but to my knowledge doesn’t provide a way to authenticate to other windows machines. Having a user log-in to their machine then log-in to a server is too much to ask of the average user. Also, Ubuntu further cluttered the matter by providing a beta version of likewise in the repositories for Lucid – 10.04 which didn’t have a way to default the domain — so the user has to type the domain/username when logging in.
As Ubuntu continues to grow in popularity and softwares move to web-based services I think the opportunities will arise. However, for institutions ingrained in a MS environment it will be a much slower process.
Jazen
September 3, 2010 at 8:12 pm
Great point! I’ve heard about this issue a great deal lately. OpenLDAP, Landscape and other tools are growing options to help integrate Ubuntu into existing deployments. The growing use of virtual desktops in many academic environments is a great opportunity for Ubuntu to start to fit into the mix. Right now if a school wants to offer virtual systems to a student they have to pay for two licenses for MS; one for the host machine and one for the virtual machine. With Ubuntu there is no license fee so students/teachers can use Ubuntu systems to access a virtual MS client and save a great deal in licensing fees.
dindafoss
September 13, 2010 at 2:14 pm
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Ubuntu in Education | Ubuntu-News - Your one stop for news about Ubuntu
September 4, 2010 at 5:35 pm
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Opinsys In English | Ubuntu in education in Finland
September 6, 2010 at 9:08 am
Hi Dinda! Thanks for the kind words!
Weekly meetings is on Wednesday btw 🙂
Also, it’s good to have you involved!
Jonathan Carter
September 6, 2010 at 3:35 pm
Perhaps linux should concentrate on reducing the dependence on internet for delivering software and try to make upgrades using CD/DVD easier.
A lot of schools in developing countries lack the basic internet connectivity.
Cheers
–arky
http://playingwithsid.blogspot.com
Arky
September 7, 2010 at 2:25 am
Yes, that’s definitely an issue. There is work on a CD/DVD upgrade process. These could be shipped out in regular intervals to help update schools in no or low bandwidth areas. The LTSP project also has a process where by low bandwidth areas could slowly upgrade the one central school server and when complete it would just be a matter of a local network upgrade for LTSP client machines. Lots of possibilities with LTSP.
dindafoss
September 13, 2010 at 2:08 pm