Cut School Technology Costs
By Matt Christensen
One of the biggest costs for schools is software. Software can be expensive on its own, and then add in that you need a license to cover all the machines that will use it. So why not use free software?! Microsoft Office is expensive. Openoffice is free and just as good if not better. Why use a Windows server when Linux is free? Ok Matt you say but Linux is hard. I don t know Linux. Ok, maybe you don t. But can you read? Sure you can, so search Google for everything you need to know about Linux. The Linux community is great at providing free help. Just hop on a forum and read.
Why buy something that is free? By switching to OpenOffice and a Linux server running Apache web server you could host your school s website and create/edit just about any document for free. Not including of course the cost of the machines.
Email is another big source of problems in schools. That can be eliminated for free as well. Google has a service for education organizations (school, universities, etc) where they will allow the use of your domain for a gmail account. For example matt@someschool.edu would be a Google account email. Then you have the sophisticated spam filtering and search powered by Google and you can check your email anywhere at any time. Not to mention no mail server to maintain.
The last source of technology frustration is teacher homepages.
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With these minor steps schools can make technology more manageable and cut costs significantly.
Matt Christensen
http://www.mattchristensen.net
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