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The European Union's interoperability page reports
The primary school in Saint Léger en Yvelines (France) has nearly completely switched to using free software reports the village's deputy mayor Olivier Guillard. "Do not underestimate the task", he advises others on the forum of Etalab, France's open government portal, "and, most of all, persist".
Saint Léger en Yvelines is a commune some 50 km west of Paris. The village has one school, with 6 classes, and includes pre-school. The Jean Moulin school is attended by all of the around 30 children in the commune up to the age of 11. On [April 15], deputy mayor Guillard published his recommendations for others that want to "free their schools from the commercial agenda of proprietary software vendors". Free software is unhindered by the constraint of financial profitability, he argues: there is no planned obsolescence and no lock-in to specific hardware.
Olivier Guillard urges rigorous testing of solutions before suggesting them to teachers. Just as important is to convince the teachers of the benefits of free software. He also recommends being proactive on maintenance and monitoring.
He cautions patience. The school's transition to free software took years, he writes. "Seven years of convincing. Seven years to find free software alternatives for each new commercial offering. Seven years of creating a dialogue and building communication channels with teachers dedicated to digitisation of education."
The school has not rid itself of proprietary software completely. Whiteboard solutions and office documents exchanged in France's education sector forces teachers to use proprietary software, for which the school keeps apart two PCs with proprietary office tools, the deputy mayor writes.
Blogger, Linux advocate, and retired 1-man school IT staff Robert Pogson has a short (two paragraph) post. [It offers several open-source software alternatives as well as hardware recommendations — fair use precludes including the whole post here. -Ed.]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2016, @10:10PM
Blogger, Linux advocate, and one-man IT. What a guy!!
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2016, @02:59AM
Pogson made a living doing Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, and finally Education.
His IT education is completely self-taught and that came by necessity.
When he arrived at his first teaching assignment, he found a pile of PCs that were infected to the gunwales and quite useless.
Doing some research, he discovered Free(dom) Software.
For $0 (in a remote, impoverished school district), he installed Linux on the "broken" boxes and turned the kids loose on them.
Same hardware, same users, but the problems disappeared.
Not having to give any more money for easily-infected EULAware, he could put all of the monetary resources toward hardware.
Smart dude; good problem solver.
Pitted in a contest of knowledge against this polymath, [google.com] who has had over 65 years to amass his substantial knowledge base, I'm quite certain that you would come up on the short end.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]