I remember reading about this school somewhere a while back. This document has all the details “A Linux School, what a wonderful school. David recently sent me a link to this article “Sydney school teaches with Linux monopoly“, its comforting to know the reasons for adopting GNU/Linux. Make sure you check it out, here’s a few snippets:
Linux may be struggling to gain a foothold in the primary and secondary education market but one Sydney school is setting itself higher grades – all without Microsoft.
At the Lorien Novalis School in the suburb of Glenhaven, 350 students from kindergarten through to year 12 and 38 staff have been learning with the penguin for the past four years.
“Our reason for going to Linux was predominantly philosophical, then for quality, and third was the cost – we wanted the best option,” he said. “We bought the Mandriva PowerPack to get the manuals and to support open source companies. Often we download free stuff but the latest version was purchased. We’re interested in free as in freedom, not that you don’t have to pay for something.”
“School education should be about cooperation and sharing knowledge, which is exactly what open source is about – that’s why I can’t understand why schools don’t embrace it on that level,” he said, adding there is a “big black hole” when it comes to Linux in education.
“People are talking about it but are still way behind,” he said. “Everyone’s interested in teaching a word processor, but not interested in a political statement. The deep technology literacy issue is not even discussed.”
“The kids love their lab and have a lot of ownership. We take it seriously how they feel about lab, and they enjoy that it works,” Rushton said. “The tinker value of Linux is brilliant and kids love to tinker so they organize their desktop in a way most people couldn’t understand it.”
Microsoft unleashes improved Firefox
The open source community is in a state of shock this morning at the news that Microsoft has released a version of popular browser Firefox.I’ll let you figure that one out.