Familiarity undoubtedly ranks among the largest barriers to open source adoption — software, like so many other things, is habit-forming. Much of that familiarity, at least among younger users, comes from the prevalence of proprietary applications in education, an area awash with government regulations, competitive bidding, and its own habit-induced hangups.

Shane Geddes is one of the first batch of students to enrol in New Zealand's first high school that uses only free and open source software - the Albany Senior High School in Auckland.

Last school year, I worked as a technology coordinator for a rural high school in Illinois. In an attempt to save the school some money, I introduced OpenOffice.org, GIMP, Firefox, and Thunderbird. Linux was also installed on a few desktop PCs and a couple of servers. Ubuntu was the Linux distribution selected.

Russian Linux software developers have created an alliance to jointly participate in tenders to supply schools with open source software. The total number of specialist entering the alliance has exceeded the given number in Mandriva and Ubuntu Canonical producer, all in all.

About 70,000 students and their 7,000 teachers in the Geneva school district will gradually be moving to Open Source. The decision to move to Open Source was taken by the Geneva Public School District in March 2006. Eventually all teachers will be supplied with laptops running Ubuntu GNU/Linux.

Even though the Israeli Ministry of Education puts much emphasis on Microsoft products, Open Source activists are beginning to make a change in this scene. An example is Blich, a famous school in Ramat-Gan, where 2 16 year old students and the school’s IT staff have replaced an outdated proprietary portal with Drupal

Since we got handed a HP Mini-note from school 3 weeks ago, I’m busy getting the school to use Linux and other Open-Source software.

MICROSOFT has suffered further set-backs in the UK education sector this week after Becta, the government procurement quango, reformed its purchasing regime to break the software giant's hold on education, and launched a programme to get schools to adopt open source software.

The administration of the Danish municipality of Lyngby-Taarbæk is installing OpenOffice on some 1700 school desktop PCs, the administration announced yesterday. The first school where OpenOffice will be installed is the Lindegård school. At the school earlier today mayor Rolf Aagaard-Svendsen showed the first desktop running the open source suite of productivity tools.