Hey all, I'm in Spain so I can't do this. But I have a bit of experience with regard to primary schools. My thoughts here are specifically to do with Free Software technology, and not just why the philosophy is good for schools, so consider these as specific cases in which FS is good for Irish primary schools. * Price is not a factor (until later) as MS have a new licencing scheme for "refurbished" PC's * Compatibility is a factor: Given an average room (In my experience) in a school, it contains machines of different generations (Pentium I all the way to Pentium 4). GNU/Linux and FreeBSD are the only operating systems that will run on all the machines. Win98 will to a certain extent. * Upgrading. This is where the difference with Win98 is. You are guaranteed to have a modern operating system on all your machines for the foreseeable future. * Quality: Free Software is produced and supported by the FOSS community and companies such as I.B.M. and Sun Microsystems. OpenOffice is used in industry and accepted as a quality product. MS even state that it has the features of Office 98 (which they think is a bad thing :) * Control: Spamassassin can be modified to scan email such that it picks up on swear words used by students. I only ever use email internally in a school due to SPAM. Furthermore, Squid can be modified to give (what I call) a virtual internet. Pages that the students are allowed to see (previously "downloaded" by staff [cached really]) are the only pages available on the "internet". This offers more control than content filtering. * Price is a factor when you start talking about email and webservers etc... Even with educational discounts, proprietary solutions are costly. * Language support: Tá GNU/Linux le fáil as Gaeilge. GNU/Linux is available in Irish (My Irish is rusty though). * Ease of integration: Free Software can be integrated into a current school environment (assuming running Windows) via OpenOffice. If a separate server (as opposed to the Windows domain/file server, if there is one) can easily be set up to provide email only. Thunderbird is a good Free Software email client for Windows. * Homogenity: Students in schools I have set up get their own desktop every time they log in on any machine. No crappy icons on the desktop installed by other users. Thus they are provided with a consistent environment over which _they alone_ are masters. Because the environment is consistent they tend to pick up the principles of computing a lot easier.
I wish to elaborate on the previous point. Assume there exists a room with 2 machines and a student (called Tux) is allowed access to both. If the machines run Windows (the main GNU/Linux competitor in schools) Tux can log into both and write and save files. There are two scenarios here 1) all files are saved to Desktop/My Documents folder etc... 2) all files are saved to a Network drive In case (1) _all_ files (Tuxs, Aidans, Bernadettes, Ciarans...etc) are saved to the same place. When Tux moves to the other computer, or returns to the same computer He/she can be confused by the absence or presence of his/her or other files.
In case (2) one has to explain the complicated operation of the client-server model to 7 year olds, before they can use computers. I've tried it, and it didn't work :)
I feel it is very important for students to control their own environment. With Free Software products we can give them control of their own environment (with little admin overhead) but control the larger environment ourselves. I have found this to be very empowering for students.
If anyone wants further explanation on _any_ point, just ask.
PS: I can give all this in a written presentation before Thursday. Geography alone makes it impossible for me to give an oral presentation.