Free software in schools users conference LinEx: Open source in all the schools of Extremadura José L. Redrejo Rodríguez Oslo, October 13th, 2008

Why am I here? ● Because I'm a father ● I'm a teacher ● I'm an engineer ● I'm part of the development core team of LinEx and in charge of its setup in the schools

Introduction video

History of the project (I) ● The regional government of Extremadura was transferred the Educational administration from the Spanish government on January 1, ● The Intranet was designed and began to be implemented in mid ● The Open Software solution began to be studied at 2001, and the decision to make our own Linux distribution was made on November, ● The first version (LinEx 2.0) was released in March, 2002, based on Debian, made by a private startup company.

● In June 2002, the regional government took control of the development and released Linex 3.0, in October ● For the years, there have been several upgrades of the distribution. Now we are running LinEx 2006 version, planning to upgrade next summer. ● In Extremadura there are about students in schools. ➢ With a goal of a ratio of one PC per two students we have machines ➢ Today they all have been working only with free software for almost five years History of the project (II)

➢ The entity responsible for the project is the Consejería (Regional ministry) of Education. ➢ Initially, the project was divided in three main parts: ➢ The intranet was developed by one of the main Spanish phone companies ➢ The Linux distribution was originally prepared by a small Linux company. Some months later the government took control over the development using our own resources. ➢ Training, publicity and support for the project was made by government employees and a public IT company. People and entities involved in the project

Budget allocation (2003 numbers) ● LinEx development: ● Hardware 170,000 € ● Software 89,000 € ● Training, support, and diffussion: 300,000 € ● TOTAL: 559,000 € ● Rest of the Technological Educative Network: ● School PC, servers and associated infrastructure: 66,710,000 € ● Training, support employees, and documentation: 540,000 € ● TOTAL: 67,250,000 € ● (Extremadura BGP=67% EU average)

General tasks we've done ● Customize Debian distribution changing some of its defaults values to our users goals ● Translation of all pending applications ● Create new applications to fulfill some of the users demands ● First year, prior to the installation of the computers, all teachers in the region where trained in general use of the computer, specific use of the computer for their subjects ● Interactive boards in primary schools

Software developments we've done (I): ● ControlAula, some sysadmin tools ● Involvement in the development of some others ● Customizations: default configs to make teachers and students life easier.

Software developments we've done (II): ● LinexEdu: collections of applications for mathematics, physics, languages, etc. ● Prepare a special setup for the schools (different in primary and secondary schools) ● Prepare a special distributions branching from LinEx: Linex Colegios with a special setup for primary schools, and JuegaLinex, a DVD full of linux games.

Current school setups ● In every school: One server with all the needed services ● In every secondary school: one technical person to support hardware and software incidences. ● Mobility desktops: log into your won desktop everywhere for all the teachers. ● Mobility desktops for every student in secondary schools (they have one pc in every desktop, for every two kids). ● Special desktops for primary schools: they have several computer classrooms. ● Pyramid structure: One regional server, one server per school, desktops connect to that server.

Other ideas to support the system ● Automatic inventory of all the computers, linked with the call center application ● Call center with a web application and support for multiple schools. ● A bunch of free courses for teachers at the training centers (every year since the beginning of the project)

Now, working on: ● Rayuela: internal organizer application for the whole educative community: parents, teachers, students, administration and government. From the economical management of the schools to the qualifications, or SMS warnings to the parents with the same application. ● Preparing a bid for a pedagogical tool, linked with Rayuela for authentication purposes, but with its focus in the collaboration between teachers, students, content clasification (based on thesaurus), automatic generation of personal, school and government portals, etc. ● New linex-colegios version, with changes in the interface ● Implementation of puppet as our standard tool to manage all the system.

Benefits of using free software ● After more than 5 years, with more than users, without using antivirus, we never had a virus ● Security: No intrusions in this time ● Administration: The IT school administrators use to complain when there are some privative OS in the school. They say that 10 of these machines produce more work than the other 700 Linux machines in the network ● Remote support: We administer remotely more than 500 primary schools that don't have IT staff ● Economical benefits: we spend the money in resources, computers, personal, etc. instead of buying licenses ● Freedom to fix, adapt, modify, change, etc.(without legal issues)

Past and present problems ● Teachers inertia for those who were used to computers ● Training of all the teachers, most of them didn't use computers, or at least didn't use computers for their classes. ● Sometimes,living on the edge trying to fix different problems with different approaches instead of using a global view (lack of time and trained people) ● The regional intranet was great in its beginning seven years ago, most people only had isdn or rtb internet access. Today, compared to our home adsl connections is too slow ● PC obsolescence

Solutions to some of the problems ● Integration with DebianEdu, we will add about 700 schools to this project with more than computers and almost six years of experience. We think we can add ideas, value and people and receive the same from that project. ● New intranet public bid ● Study, improve and integrate with some other projects with repositories of educative contents and applications, mainly focused on the students curricula and standardized thesaurus. All the projects should be integrated in a web site with one login/password.

Future (now being tested) deployments: ● In the short time: all the old computers are going to be used as thin clients: We have just bought terminal servers (one per each classroom) that will be deployment around December. There is one pilot secondary school with 700 computers working that way since May. ● In the medium and long term: There will be a computer per student in secondary schools. Technically, economical and politically we've decided to use laptops. There is one pilot project in a secondary school that's beginning next week. ● For technical and security reasons the laptops will work as low fat clients in the schools, and as standard laptops if they're taken at home by teachers and/or students.

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