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.

A big MIS-take… MIS stands for Management Information System. A MIS is at the heart of every school office nowadays. In the UK the leading MIS is from Capita-SIMS.net and it has a huge market share. In fact for many it is the de-facto school MIS.

My school uses a SIS program called Infinite Campus. The SIS (Student Information System) is the backbone for any school. If you use, are employed by, and/or have high regards for the Infinite Campus company, I strongly advise that you not to read this post, as it may smash your high-held opinions about this fraud into little tiny shards.

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.

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.

A course set up by a Junior High public school in Monza, Northern Italy, involves students who find difficult to focus on theoretical, talk-only lessons by teaching them how to build their own computer and install Ubuntu on it. A few participants went back to Windows after the course, but the majority liked Ubuntu so much to stick to it.

Midland Valley High School, in Aiken, SC, received a grant allowing it to deploy Moodle and offer students laptops.

School starts early in Georgia. The kids are all back at it. It was on a pre-semester visit to my son’s high school that I got a shock on Friday.

Lake City, Florida USA is the home of a rather unconventional school, New Generation. It is a non-profit, private school for students grade 6th through 12th that are at risk of dropping out of school due to educational difficulties. With a maximum population of 60 students, New Generation has an astounding success rate amongst a category of students that most of society has given up on.