Taking a Look at some educational tools available combining use with gmail:

Taking a Look at some educational tools available combining use with gmail:

Exchange 2010 - When combined with a Microsoft Desktop, the eCAL, and the extreme discounts afforded to education, there simply was no better combination.

Zimbra - Close second, but to get something that competed with Exchange you had to go with Zimbra Pro (I think it was called Enterprise before VMware purchased it). But the education discounts were not very good to be perfectly honest and the collaboration part would have cost just as much as our end to end Microsoft platform.

Google - Tied with Microsoft Live@EDU. I have a love/hate relationship with Google. They are becoming the new Microsoft from 15 years ago which is dissappointing. I like their tools, but increasingly to get the full google experience you need all things google which essentially means Chrome. I feel like shortly they will start making things only work on ChromeOS or Android forcing people to move away from Microsoft and Apple. The two biggest issues we had though was the poor integration with Active Directory (and the moving "student data" into the cloud), and at the time we were doing the evaluation google had experienced several large scale public outages.

Microsoft Live@EDU - Essentially this reduced to hosted exchange. We might actually still move out students into this in some sort of co-hosted (staff in house, students in the cloud) model, but there was no significant cost savings. There still isn't much cost savings to move out students to the cloud because administration would still be the same, and only a tiny incremental portion of hardware would be saved.

One must as a rule in the Tech department to get Chrome out as as standard, or at least a dual standard. There are now active directory extensions so it can be managed almost as well as IE8/9, and with a competent tech group there are not many applications that must run in IE (some activeX sites still require it). There is little reason to not run two browsers *if* you can educate your end users. Right now we run Firefox and IE, but we are about to stop supporting Firefox and swap it with Chrome. Our education push happens later this fall.

As for using IE with gmail, We have not found any problems at all. Disabling compatibility view pretty much resolves any issues at all, and make sure your flash and java are current is all that should be required. I have found that some VLC plugins have recently been causing me grief with Chrome indirectly causing Flash to crash, but I don't quite understand why. I can repeat this with tools like uStream on demand,,, removing VLC resolves it.

Finally, people should  considered the actual Gmail tips? They have some pretty good stuff on there, not to mention the icons for the ninja make people smile every time. :)

https://mail.google.com/mail/help/tips.html


Something else:

Has anyone looked at Karoshi Linux, Moodle or Joomla recently?

Karoshi Linux (now the Linux Schools Project) http://www.linuxgfx.co.uk/demo.html has been around for quite a while, comes with a rather full & integrated suite of features, driven by LDAP, with a Samba PDC to support Windows clients, It sports Moodle, Joomla and standard e-mail. Moodle has all manner of integration modules written for it. Is this not groupware-ish enough for a stand-alone school, or even a small school district?

Now, I'm curious what features Exchange and Zimbra provide that add value to the process flow of an edu organization besides the functional equivalent of email & scheduling. Are the needs pretty basic, or is it the drive for customization that leads bigger schools to big packages with big support?

Also.... at what scale is this discussion? If we're talking an entire school district, then Microsoft pretty much has the school district market sewn up with their discounting & the typical IT budgets of a municipal school district.

For smaller- to-mid-sized individual, independent schools, it used to not be cost effecting to become a Microsoft shop (w/ the lack of per-seat discounts afforded the district-scale organizations).  MS changed their site & district pricing to accommodate smaller districts and/or independent schools.
There's so much that could and should be done, but the sad state of primary & secondary education IT is stuck in a short-sighted quagmire. The small schools can't afford the help to drive innovation, the bigger schools just throw money at the problem.

Is Linux only for the poor? Posted by Christopher Dawson

Last week, I followed a conversation on an OpenSuse Education newsletter to which I subscribe. I didn’t have time to join in, but it did get me thinking about open source in education more broadly. Regular readers will know that my school district has made serious strides in the last couple of years, particularly as it relates to technology. However, those same regular readers will also know that the community is hurting like many other aging mill towns and that I frequently at least explore open source solutions as money savers.

For now, most open source use is among students. All of the elementary schools use Open Office; we don’t have any Office licenses in place with the exception of a couple secretarial power users who are able to exploit some of the advanced features in Office 2007. Students throughout the district use Open Office at home, saving themselves the trouble of using Works if it came preinstalled on their computers or to avoid buying Office. I hand out CDs and USB keys to students with dialup access loaded with OO.org 3.

An increasing number of students and teachers have turned to Linux as they try to eek out a bit of extra life on their computers or decide that they don’t like whatever version of Vista came preinstalled on computers they recently purchased. I’m happy, along with a couple of my techs, to help people get up an running with Linux. However, we haven’t yet rolled out Linux formally in our schools. The only time we had a full Linux lab was when we had absolutely no technology funding in my second year teaching and I let my students build a lab from old donated computers.

Which leads me to the point of this post? If you have money in your district, is there any reason to use Linux? The original conversation I mentioned earlier was started by an IT staffer at an exclusive, well-funded private school. They were a Windows shop and saw no incentive to change. Licensing costs were a non-issue. Even we still largely use Windows and OS X, despite my fondness for Linux. We’ve been granted the funding to do so in the last couple of years and my primary goal has been instructional integration of computing, rather than worrying about training for a Linux rollout.

We’re hunkering down now budget-wise for a tough couple of years. While we have solid technology in place, new acquisitions will be very carefully scrutinized for cost and benefit; there are very few pennies to spare. Saving $50 per computer on OS licensing just might be the difference between funding a project and needing to wait for 1-2 years.

So again, is Linux only useful in a recession or in South American countries trying to get as many computers into the hands of rural schoolchildren as they can?

Cost will certainly give people a reason to switch, but I don’t think a crappy economy or poverty in a developing country is the only reason to use Linux and open source software. I won’t even get into the argument of exposing kids to a variety of computing environments. I think the biggest reason to use Linux (aside from potential cost savings if you can develop some in-house *nix expertise) is simply the giant body of software that is freely available.

The OpenSUSE Education project is a great example. Desktop software included with this project ranges from computer science applications for kids to the R statistical programming interface. Server software ranges from OpenSIS to Joomla.

Whether your school has money or not, there is incredible value in the open source community. Perhaps most important, though, is that word “community.” We can talk all we want about global economies, but allowing students and staff to be part of and participate in a community that drives the way we use technology is an incredible opportunity. Keep in mind that there is plenty of open source value for Windows users; we don’t all have to switch to Linux to reap the benefits of FOSS.