John, Your project is quite exciting and ambitious. I think the hardest group to get interested is the students but they aren't the hardest group to sell on the idea (apathy can be useful sometimes). Maybe you can pitch it to students...almost everything they know and use daily is actually built on top open source...Android Phones, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, etc... If Ubuntu (or some variant) is good enough for Google desktops and linux is good enough for Pixar (and other animation firms) wouldn't it be good enough for a school?
If you want to wow them, Marble (a 3D globe with current and historic maps) is good, along with inkscape for vector illustration and gimp for photo editing. Another selling point to the students, the computers will work, the software can be kept up to date, old computers will run faster, and everything they use at school they can also use at home. Some ammo to help with the Administration, there are quite a few local Linux user groups who could probably lend a hand and it's not hard to find professional IT who can support such a system. http://lalugs.org/ http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale10x The county of Los Angeles actually uses a significant amount of open source. Last I heard OpenOffice was part of the county standard install, with only special exceptions made for certain job titles getting MS Excel. I can't find a reference for this (inside information from someone I know in LA) but there is this great page on open source mapping technology is use. http://egis3.lacounty.gov/eGIS/open-source-gis/ Feel free to pull any slides you want from any of my talks on open source, http://www.scribd.com/wildintellect If there's something you want the original Libreoffice format for let me know. Hopefully someone on this list will chime in with the bay area group that helps support school computing with open source. I could give you lots more material on how open source can be used in teaching (which I do) but I'll save that for later if you want more. Last bit of advise with students, leverage social media and cell phones. Thanks, Alex Granada Hills High Alumni (pre-charter) B.S. University of California, Davis Phd Candidate, University of California, Davis On 05/22/2012 06:53 PM, John Kim wrote: > Hi guys! > > I'm John, a HS sophomore from Los Angeles. Very recently, I kickstarted an > idea about making Ubuntu the main OS within John Marshall High School, a > dilapidated high school, still standing and reeking of age, that has been > using Windows XP for a decade now. For those who haven't heard, I have a > post about it: > http://epikvision.blogspot.com/2012/05/game-changing-proposal-ubuntu-for.html > > here's the situation: although I created a proposal, I did not hand it in > to the administration just yet (we only got one shot at this). David Montes > and I are trying to build a support base and handy foundation of research > data. We see three primary audiences: teachers, students, and the > administration. The best way to go, we decided, is one audience at a time. > > So, now that I'm trying to get students' attention,* I would like to hear > ideas and suggestions on marketing techniques and ways to rouse student > interest*. In my school, it's mighty difficult to spark students' interest > of an OS that most has never heard of. So I leave some room for discussion. > There's only 3 weeks left of school, and I hope to gain momentum asap. > > One thing I thought about is to hold a demo hands-on for students to > compare windows xp and ubuntu side by side. After that, the people would > take a surveymonkey on their experience. I see some weakness, including > limited resources (we can't just borrow a student laptop cart and install > half of them ubuntu) or sponsorship (what room can allow us to carry this > out? it's a lengthy process to get teacher permission). Many more exist, > I'm sure. > > 2 people - David Montes and myself - alone can't make so grand a project > possible without support. Ideas and suggestions are welcome, but > hopefully, it is do-able within 3 weeks. Thanks for your time. > > > > -- Ubuntu-us-ca mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-us-ca
