AT: Education Ministry plans increase of Open Source in schools

— filed under: [T] Policies and Announcements, [GL] Austria

by Administrator — published on May 05, 2008

The Austrian ministry for Education wants to increase the use of Open Source software in elementary and primary schools.

The ministry will begin to disseminate a collection of Open Source software made by a math-, sport- and IT-teacher in the city of Weiz, Helmuth Peer. With support from Sun Microsystems the ministry will be sending DVDs containing Peer's software distribution to 1600 schools in Austria. The DVD will also be handed out at education fairs and at presentations, Peer says.

The teacher published the most recent version of his Education Open Source software collection, titled Desktop4Education (D4E) and Server4Education (S4E) on 17 April.

Peer says the ministry is keen to increase the use of Open Source in schools. "When they saw how well this collection of free software works at my school, they realised the potential."

So far about thirty to fifty schools in Austria are considering D4E and S4E, estimates Peer. The software is in use at his own school, the Weizer Gymnasium and at the 'Volksschule am Tabor', an elementary school in Neusiedl am See.

The Weizer Gymnasium has 634 students and 55 teachers, Peer says and about three hundred of the students use his software almost daily. Peer's Open Source offering is impressive: for writing, standard calculations and drawings the students use OpenOffice. To make vector graphics they use Inkscape and for image manipulation application they can turn to Gimp. Peer included the algebra system Wxmaxima and Maxima and for computer aided design offers Qcad. For desktop publishing the students use Scribus and to introduce them to programming Peer included a combination of the GCC compiler, the software development tool Eclipse, the programming language PHP and HTML. The students are also able to edit audio using Audacity and edit video with Kino.

The D4E/S4E collection also contains basic networking and Internet applications such as Apache, MySQL, LDAP, Cups and Cyrus. Also included is the E-learning software Moodle.

Peer is very enthusiastic about the support from the ministry and Sun: "We intend to install D4E and S4E on a lot of schools."

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