I've been saying it for a long time, schools spend too much money on their IT infrastructure, and Albany Senior High School from northern Auckland proves it:
With wonderful solutions such as Userful and an entire eco-system of open source applications available to every major Linux distribution out there, there is no justification for schools to run on proprietary software.
Moreover, there is a popular, false argument:
Despite the dominance of Windows, teachers and students were largely receptive to using the software, Brennan said. The main area of objection was over the use of particular packages. "There's a perception that students should train with real-world products," Brennan said, but that was outweighed by the advantages of being able to give every student access to any software they needed, rather than having to restrict use because of limited licences, especially in specialist areas such as music.
Brennan is correct, but he should have gone further. The fallacious argument that learning to use one program effectively locks someone out of another, similar program might make sense to people who did not grow up with computers, but not to those who have been using them from a young age. However, as Brennan says, using open source makes computing resources available to all the children.
A child who uses LibreOffice at school will not take long to adjust to Microsoft Office, nor will a child who uses GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) at school need more than a brief course to become accustomed to Photoshop, if he or she decides to get training in it after school. And besides all of these applications are getting better all the time, and more and more smaller businesses understand the overwhelming advantages of using open source software.
So not only does a child benefit from a generalist computer education with open source software, but it is most certainly feasible that having trained in LibreOffice, GIMP, Inkscape, etc. might actually be advantageous when it comes to getting a job. At the very least, having experience in the above is much better than having none at all on account of not being able to afford the licence fees.
