Taste of Tech

A recent discussion about providing access to students’ home directories from outside of school reminded me of all of the open source applications we run on our servers. When faced with a new challenge, I frequently turn to the open source community to see if a solution is already available that can be adapted to our situation. As a result, our district has saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in software licensing costs over the last decade. Here are some of the heavy hitters:

Linux
When I was hired in 1999, I was asked how I felt about Linux. I had used it… a little. I had installed it and tried to run some server applications with little success. Three months later, I was “in charge” of a Linux server that housed our web site, all of our student accounts, and the staff and student data for the high school. There’s no better motivation to learn something new than someone standing in your doorway saying, “umm… nobody can log in to the computers.”

Today, we have 24 servers running in the district, 21 of which are running Linux. We don’t pay licensing fees for the operating system or most of the applications running on these servers. We don’t buy client access licenses. We have no limits on the number of network accounts we can have. This single decision is saving us thousands of dollars per year. Every time we set up a new server, we install the CentOS distribution of Linux, and we’re ready to go.

Samba
On just about every server, we run Samba. Samba makes Windows computers think they’re logging in to a Windows domain, when in fact the server running Linux behind the scenes. While it doesn’t have all of the support for Active Directory that you’d find in a Windows server, it does more than enough to meet our needs.

Apache/MySQL/DHCP Server/DNS Server/PHP/Perl
Apache is a web server. Many web applications use the PHP and/or Perl scripting languages, and MySQL provides a database backend for these applications. Built-in DNS and DHCP servers make network management much easier. The nice thing is that all of these are included in a standard Linux distribution, so you don’t really have to worry about them very much after the initial configuration.

Wordpress
I have not seen a better piece of software for allowing people to quickly and easily post content on the web without having to learn much of anything about how the web works. Wordpress is wonderful. Log in. Click “Write”. Type what you have to say. Click Publish. We’re using it for teacher blogs, and we’re adding more all the time. “You really think blogging is the way to go?” a science teachers asked me last week. Yeah, I do. Did I mention that you can download Wordpress, install it on your server, and set up as many blogs as you like for free?

Moodle
Moodle is an online learning platform. It’s used for teaching classes online. You could go out and license Blackboard or WebCT. They’ll charge you a fortune, license by the number of students using it, and place restrictions on how long your subscription lasts. Or, you could use Moodle for free. Want to just play around with online learning without jumping in with both feet? Teach a lesson (or extend a lesson) with Moodle. If you decide it’s not for you, you haven’t wasted thousands of dollars on a software license.

MRBS
The initial need was to have a calendar that we could use for scheduling our school facilities. A lot of outside groups use our schools in the evenings and on non-school days, and we need a better system to keep track of this use. We’re still working on a solution for that, but in the meantime, I found Multi-Room Booking System. This is a web based calendar that can be used to schedule shared resources. We set up one for each of our buildings, and they’re using it to schedule computer labs, media center spaces, projectors and multimedia devices, and other shared resources. Staff members can see at a glance what is available when, and they can sign up to use any of these spaces or resources when they’re available. Best of all, they can’t double-book resources or remove someone else’s reservation.

PhpESP
You can use online survey tools. Some of them are very good, but they’re also expensive. Others are free or very inexpensive, but they also contain advertising or other undesirable characteristics. With PhpESP, you can create your own online surveys, determine when they’re available, and immediately get the results.

SmbWebClient
SmbWebClient is a script gets installed on your web server. You configure it to log in to your file server from your web server. This allows students and staff members to access the files on their network accounts from any Internet-connected computer. Students and staff no longer need to email files back and forth. There’s also a reduced need for flash drives and other portable media. Just log in, upload or download your files, and you’re all set.

MediaWiki
All right, maybe we don’t quite use MediaWiki as much as we could. But we do have it installed. MediaWiki is the software that runs Wikipedia. Want to create your own collaborative documents? This software will do it. In addition to being able to collaboratively write documents, you also get version tracking and the ability to revert to a previous revision of the document.

Xmail/Dovecot/OpenLDAP
Let’s say you want to run your own mail server, but you don’t want to spend a fortune on Microsoft Exchange. Or maybe you realize that Microsoft Outlook is just about the worst email application ever written, and you don’t want to use it. While I won’t say that configuration and management are easy, you can use entirely open source tools to set up your own email implementation. We’re using Xmail for sending and retrieving mail, and Dovecot as an imap server. And OpenLdap provides the directory services.

ASSP
You’ve set up your own mail server, and now you’re getting all this spam. No problem. Use ASSP. Its user-friendly web-based administration and aggressive tuning options give you a powerful and economical solution for alleviating the spam problem.

Squirrelmail
When setting up our mail server a few years ago, we made the mistake of installing a groupware package. We picked the best one we could find, and it did work reasonably well. But it was big, and hard to administrate, and the web mail client wasn’t its strong suit. We quickly realized that most of the staff in our district were only using it as a webmail client. They didn’t need the groupware functions. Last fall, we switched to SquirrelMail, a php-based webmail client. It does webmail much better than the groupware solution, and it’s lighter, easier to manage, and faster to load.

Custom Scripts
There’s no product to download here. But because everything we run uses open standards, and many of the applications are in scripted languages, it’s fairly easy to customize applications to suit our own needs. We use custom generated scripts to archive our email. We use rsync and some scripting to perform nightly backups across the network to backup servers in other buildings. We use scripts to keep all of the accounts on the various servers in sync, so users can log in anywhere with the same username and password. We’ve written tools to interface with our content management system, our user security database, the blogging software, calendar software, and other applications to make them work together. In cases where we’re using proprietary software, we often lack the ability to make these connections between applications. One of the big advantages of using these tools has been the ability to create a fairly seamless, unified system from significantly disparate elements.

Time is running out for you to sign up for your free Yugma Premium account. In December, Yugma announced that they were giving away free one-year subscriptions to their premium service to any blogger who requests one. The offer expires January 31, though, so you’d better hurry up if you want one.

Yugma is desktop-sharing software. It allows you to share your computer screen with others over the Internet. After signing up, you can create a session. You then start sharing your screen in that session, so anyone connecting to it can see what’s on your screen. You can invite others to participate by sending them the session id.

This is extraordinarily useful software for distance conferencing. I can use it to do a webinar, and show my presentation while I’m talking. Or, I can demonstrate software, with the participants able to see what I’m doing. Generally, you’d want to pair it with an audio conference, either through Skype or a phone system. There’s also a built-in text chat.

If you miss the premium account promotion, you can still sign up for the free version. It works just as well as the premium one, but it does require all of the participants to register before they can join your session. It also has fewer options in the areas of file sharing and recording, but it does meet most needs pretty well. After using it, you can upgrade later if you need the advanced features.

Back in the dark ages, I remember being very upset about the amount of money I spent in the college bookstore as an incoming freshman. Every course had at least one textbook that had to be purchased. English had several books, but at least they were small and relatively cheap. The kicker, I remember, was calculus. This was no $35 paperback like the structured programming and educational psychology texts. No, this was a $65 hardcover tome that I wasn’t looking forward to lugging around campus. The only consolation was that it contained three courses’ worth of calculus, so I was saving money in the long run.

That book is still sitting on my bookshelf, though I can’t say that I’ve opened it in the last decade. After three semesters, it was out of date and practically worthless. There wasn’t really much point in selling it back. Besides, I was going to be a math teacher. It might come in handy when teaching AP Calculus somewhere down the road. Like I said, its main purpose in life these days is to keep the bookshelf from blowing away if an unexpected tornado should rip through our home office.

Things have changed a lot since I went to college. This week, The Business Shrink reported that college textbook prices rose 186% between 1986 and 2004. They cite two studies by the U. S. government that report an annual increase in textbook costs of around 6%. That’s about double the inflation rate. The average American college student spends $893 a year on textbooks. If you’re interested, you can read the U. S. Department of Education Report or the Government Accountability Office Report.

There doesn’t seem to be any indication that things have improved since 2004. In an unscientific survey of college students working in my office, we determined that, while textbook prices vary widely, a student can expect to spend around $100 per book. Some of the texts include CDs, and these have to be purchased new because the digital rights management on them prevents them from being re-sold. Sometimes, students can get a break by purchasing electronic-only versions of the textbooks in a subscription model, but students still spend $100-150 per course for books.

That’s the college picture. What about K-12? Our science books are running around $65 for the student edition. Our geometry book is $68. The American history book is $99. All told, each of our high school students is carrying around at least $350-400 worth of textbooks. That’s well over half a million dollars worth of books for our 1600 student high school. In fact, district-wide, we spend more than twice as much money each year on textbooks as we do on technology.

Now… what if we wrote our own books? I know, I’m crazy. But hear me out. We have the best teachers around. Our American history teachers can make their subject come alive. Our math teachers can explain really complicated things in a way that makes them seem easy. Our biology teachers can draw a diagram on the board from scratch in 40 minutes that explains photosynthesis better than a whole chapter in the students’ bio books. All of these teachers could create their own teaching materials, and those materials would be better than the ones we’re spending a fortune on now.

Right now, our teachers get $37.50 per hour for course of study writing. Let’s say we want them to write a textbook. A year-long course might be divided into thirty chapters, with each being in the neighborhood of 10-20 pages long. I’m thinking in terms of a traditional textbook for the moment, though the final result may not necessarily take that form. If I could encorporate creative commons and public domain work along with my own writing, I could probably create a first draft of a chapter in about 20 hours. Revisions and peer editing might take another 5-10 hours. All told, we could probably write the book for around $30,000. That will last us five years, after which we would have to spend more money to revise it (though significantly less than the original investment).

If we do this for a course that all students take, that works out to about $75 per student. For that much, we could just buy the textbooks and be done with it. But what if we write an American history text, and we get the school down the street to write world history, and we trade? Then, we get two textbooks for $30,000. If ten schools did this, we could cover the whole social studies department without spending any more money. If a hundred schools participated, we could probably take care of all of our textbook needs at every grade level, in every subject. For 10% of our current textbook budget, we could build a sustainable program.

“But there are no books,” you’re saying. “You haven’t printed anything.” Right. There are lots of ways to handle this. Here are a few ideas:

• Use newsprint. We have our school newspaper printed on newsprint for around 25 cents a copy. Print each unit as needed, and give a disposable copy to the students. They’re carrying around a paper that weighs a few ounces instead of a big, heavy book. At the end of the unit, just recycle them. Total cost? Maybe $8 per kid for a year long class.
• Use portable media. Burn it to a CD or put it on a flash drive. The students would have to have computers to read it, which would be a big disadvantage. They could selectively print if necessary, but that would be expensive if they did it on laser printers at school. The focus would have to be on reading it on the screen. I saw an ad for customized 1 GB flash drives yesterday. They were $8 each, and we can get our school logo printed on them. CDs are about 20 cents each.
• Put it on the web. We could use a wiki for a collaborative document, or we could put it in a course management system if we wanted to control access to it. Students access the material online. There’s nothing to carry back and forth to school. Again, they have to have computers to access it, but we could provide hard copies to those without access if necessary.
• Use Portable devices. Use a document reader in a PDA, or an e-book reader, or even an mp3 player. Remember, we’re saving a few hundred thousand dollars a year, here. Over time, this might even be enough to pay for a 1:1 laptop initiative. That would have a transformational effect on how we do school.

I’m not saying there aren’t challenges. But information is not at a premium anymore. We shouldn’t be paying these prices just for information. We can put that stuff together ourselves and do a better job for less money.

Magic Kingdom

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Epcot

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Hollywood Studios

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Animal Kingdom

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