On Tue, 2014-11-25 at 16:06 +1000, Fraser Tweedale wrote:
A friend of mine recently went through a similar situation with a state primary school Queensland: a BYOD (laptop) program where the only supported operating systems were Windows and Mac OS X. He corresponded with the principal and later, iirc, someone from the project team at Education Queensland (the gov't department).
His experience was positive - the principal and department were open to supporting other OSes and he was going to document the process of getting GNU+Linux laptops connected with the potential of officially supporting GNU+Linux in the future. The importance of positive communication - selling the benefits of a more heterogeneous computing environment that reduced financial burden on families and avoided vendor lock-in, and the credit it would be to the school community and staff - cannot be overstated.
Thanks for the info and ideas. I am certainly going to take this up directly with the school leaders, what would really help me are examples of other schools which have been through the same process and made more informed decisions. Concrete examples including documentation of the arguments and approaches made would be especially helpful. I am sure that others have already written better proposals and evaluations than I would be able to, having to start from scratch would certainly hinder my progress. If anyone has pointers to such materials (or pointers to pointers to such materials, etc) that would be greatly received. I started with the FSF of course, and they encouragingly have a section for education: http://www.gnu.org/education/ Alas it seems mostly focussed on choice of software on regular platforms, it seems they have not observed or addressed this new BYOD trend in schools, and in particular I don't think there is a lot here that the regular public would relate to the school proposal. Cheers, Martin