mberry

Actually, the primary national curriculum for ICT is not at all restrictive. The QCA 'optional' schemes of work, and perhaps local authority interpretations of it and them, were. Free Schools and Primary Academies won't have to follow the new curriculum, and all the other schools may be given the right to opt out too. That said, I did the mapping exercise against the (now seriously dated) QCA scheme of work a while ago, see: ICT Curriculum - Schoolforge-UK there were a few gaps at the time, many around the control/monitoring side of things - Arduino and Wedo/picoboard support in Scratch have this covered now. Whilst it, understandably, caused some comment above in this community, my Point 9, "Use Volunteer Support", is I think relevant to the small primary context described. If the school doesn't happen to have a willing Linux guru amongst their parent body, an approach to the local Linux User Group is, in my experience, unlikely to fall on deaf ears. LTSP is /very/ low maintenance. Some of the most exciting developments in supporting open source deployment at primary/elementary level have happened in developing countries, where tech support is perhaps even thinner on the ground than it will be here after the spending review: see, eg, the Shuttleworth supported TuxLabs project, Edubuntu, and OLPC.

Hey, congratulations, David! What an interesting discussion. Far, far too many points for me to respond to, agree with or rebut each individually. Point 8, of the original list, is, of course the crucial one: "Empower your people". The state we're in is due, in no small part, to a culture of deprofessionalisation which has reduced teaching to the delivery of prepared and approved schemes of work and many gifted technologists such as yourselves to rarely more than tech support, at least where you've not be replaced by centralised managed services. The argument here is, at its core, about empowerment and the big-society vision of folks actually having the right/responsibility to do things for themselves. The philosophy that underpins open source and the principles of liberal, small government are closely linked - see (assuming you're not relying on a school internet connection). Will this require us to do things that we didn't have to when all this was done for us? Yes. Sorry. But it will be so much more fun, and you, and the teachers you work with, will get the chance to do so much cool, innovative stuff. Please don't assume it's any harder either. Learning new skills, or teaching yourself these things, is kinda what schools are for. If I were secretary of state, would I make every school in the country go open source? No. That's no more about empowering your people than making them pay for managed services that they don't want, cost too much and may not be fit for purpose (well, OK, it's a bit more about empowerment than that, but you get my point). Would I want them to be able to make an informed choice from all the alternatives on a level playing field. Yes. Would I expect schools to justify the money they spend on software and services when free alternatives are available? Yes I rather think I would. I suspect the current incumbent might too. In truth, my original article could perhaps have coped with a few more 'consider's and 'compare's, as really this is about schools thinking these things through for themselves and making informed rational choices. That said, merely 'considering' or 'comparing' won't, in itself, save money. OK. A few further points. 1. There is no money. 2. Even if there was, the DfE don't appear to care much about ICT. 3. There'll be much less done centrally in future - schools may have (semi) protected funding, but that's not true for central or local government 4a. The new academies and free schools are essentially independent schools, publicly funded. 4b. The schools that remain funded through the LA are likely to have more freedom and autonomy too. 5. Read Ofsted's report on The Importance of ICT, paying particular attention to all the bits that talk about value for money, alternative applications and operating systems and open source. Failing that, read my (biased) summary.

Whilst unconferences rely on the contributions of all their participants, we're delighted to announce that we have two outstanding keynote presenters to top and tail the day, providing inspiration and provoking discussion. George Auckland, Head of Learning Innovation, BBC Learning. George's experience and expertise spans the original ‘open source’ education computer, the BBC Micro, and the most recent BBC open source project, BBC Open Lab. Graham Attwell, Director of Pontydysgu, is well known in the field of technology-enhanced teaching and learning. Graham's recent work focuses on new applications and approaches to e-Portfolios and Personal Learning Environments and use of social software for learning and knowledge development. We are really keen to have as many participant led presentations as possible - register at User account | Open Source Schools and tick the unconference09 group, or just join the unconference09 group if you're already registered. To create a session proposal visit http://opensourceschools.org.uk/node/add/sessionproposal

Oops . The first section at Unconference 09 | Open Source Schools and the copy on our front page reads "Places are free for all school and local authority staff", which is what we meant. I'll correct the other copy. My apologies. Please come.

I'll be there. Presenting on "informal learning and moodle" - more about the former than the latter.

The full document's at http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/media/123372/090224opensource.pdf At first glance, Action Point 5 may well be relevant to the world of BSF: A few further thoughts over at A level playing field for open source software | Open Source Schools

Thanks for posting the above, David. There's an unedited, four hour long, recording of this afternoon's meeting at FlashMeeting Memo , thanks to David's rather impressive management of the webcam. Whilst much of the focus of the discussion was about helping teachers in using open source to support, enhance, extend the curriculum, the Open Source Schools community is a good mix of teachers, technical staff and LA/policy types. We're quite keen that it remain that way - reflecting, I hope, the way that open source projects have room for folk doing core development, modules, bug-fixes, feature requests (usually, quite a few people in this group) and documentation. Be great to have lots more folk from here over there.

Following feedback from the community and some of the other stakeholders, the AlphaPlus team behind Open Source Schools invited me to take over the design and development of the community website, which kept me surprisingly busy over the Christmas holidays! I've set up a blog style front page, with a mechanism for all registered users to submit content, improved the navigation, redesigned the forum with email notifications and pulled in some news feeds via RSS. Drupal has been a great tool for this, with an amazing range of community contributed modules that extend the core functionality. Any feedback on the site gratefully received. The redesigned site went live over the weekend at Open Source Schools in advance of BETT, with quite a bit of activity in the forums on Monday and Tuesday. We'd be delighted if any Edugeek folk with interest in, experience of or views about open source software would like to get involved. I'm presenting along with Michelle Walters, Doug Belshaw and José Picardo on this at BETT on the Saturday (10:45-11:30 in the Club Room) if anyone wanted to stop by to say hello. My apologies for cross posting.

Terry Freedman and I are presenting at the BETT show on the Saturday, for the BCS with the above title, exploring children's informal learning outside the classroom and what implications this might have for teachers and schools. As well as a literature review and some case studies, we've also put together a quick google-form based survey (see http://edtechuk.net ) to get some quantitative data of our own. I wonder if there's any chance of some of you pointing a few students towards the above address, or passing it on to colleagues who might be able to find a spare 10-15 minutes for a class to fill in the blanks. We'll obviously be sharing our findings at BETT, and probably through some follow-up pieces afterwards. Apologies (in advance) for cross posting elsewhere.

Well, telling the nice lady about the time the file server exploded might be a bit too warty. I don't think she's written up that 'linux filerservers have a tendency to explode', but we'll know who to blame if she has. Seriously, alphaplus (like OSS-watch in FE/HE) have a brief to provide information about open source, rather than promoting open source; I'd see a wikipedia style NPV as fine.

It's early days, but, given Becta's backing, the project has the potential to reach a broader audience than the wonderful schoolforge has thus far. I'm pushing for getting as many (warts and all) case studies onto the site as we can - do register and write something up if you get a moment.

Not if (and I think this is the default behaviour) it only serves DHCP requests for the thin client side of the network. This is what happened out of the box for us at any rate.

The Edubuntu server's designed to run with a pair of NICs, one connecting out to the rest of your network and the real world, the other handling the thin clients, although you can run it on a single card. Whilst the default for the thin client side is 192.168.0.x, you can edit the DHCP file on the Edubuntu server to provide the thin clients with addresses on another subnet, See http://www.edubuntu.org/GettingStarted

If you have access to it, the guest log-in button is normally enabled/disabled at Moodle » Administration » Users » Authentication options in the common setting section, or at least it was in the version of Moodle to which I have admin access... The Using Moodle course on moodle.org (http://moodle.org/course/view.php?id=5) is a very friendly and supportive place - you'd be very welcome to join, and would then have direct access to a worldwide network of Moodle users, admins and developers. The enrolment fee is 10% of the annual licence costs ;-)

Word has it that Atomwide's Moodle/Elgg solution passed all of Becta's "exhaustive" technical tests, but their bid for the framework agreements was excluded for other, non-technical reasons.