Cut School Technology Costs

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. IT or web developers usually can not keep up with all of the demands of every teacher wanted their own personal page on the school’s website. There is no need for that. If you switch to Google mail then you will automatically get a Blogger account. Now every teacher now has an easy to manage blog. Also Google has a web page builder giving every account an easy to design/update personal webpage. Now all a tech guy needs to do is maintain a list of personal web pages on the school site. This would free up IT to do more important jobs like clearing paper jams. With these minor steps schools can make technology more manageable and cut costs significantly

Privacy and Media

Today I saw a news story on MTV that boggled my mind. It was a VT student complaining about the media not giving students privacy especially him. This student taped the events of the VT murders from his dorm room, posted it on youtube, and wrote about it on his blog. A blog on the world wide web. The student then agrees to do a story on MTV about lack of privacy from the media when his website got tons of hits and media began contacting him about it. If you do not like the media invading your privacy then why not decline to do a media piece on tv? Also, did he really think his site would not get attention? He had a student perspective on the biggest slaughter in US history. Here’s a tip - If you want privacy, do not post personal videos on youtube and write personal information on a public blog.