The plan is that 60 thousand Russian teachers will be able to complete the training and testing procedure by the end of 2009 which means that as soon as next year all the schools in Russia will be able to switch to open-source software which definitely should be appreciated by the open-source community.

About 70,000 students and their 7,000 teachers in the Geneva school district will gradually be moving to Open Source. The decision to move to Open Source was taken by the Geneva Public School District in March 2006. Eventually all teachers will be supplied with laptops running Ubuntu GNU/Linux.

"Jean-Paul Huchon, president of the Région Ile de France (the greater Paris local government) has announced yesterday that his administration has started distributing 220 000 USB keys with Free and Open-Source software on it, including Firefox. The recipients are mostly students (173 000 of them) and teachers (40 000)..."

Training teachers and students to use a piece of software makes that software more valuable. Vendors know this. Business sense, not altruism, is what drives deep discounts on software for education. I once spoke to a vendor of an online grade book who, upon learning that I train teachers, was very interested in my using it in my classes.

I am really liking what I see in the "Linux for schools" category. I am curious though, what about the other people in the school that may not be teachers or students?

This site is dedicated to collecting and cataloging lesson plans for classroom teachers interested in moving beyond mere document production and really tapping in to the promise of technology integration and education.

The pilot project to migrate schools of three Russian regions to Free Software has recently expanded its geography. Now it is possible for the schools outside of Tatarstan, Perm krai and Tomsk region to voluntarily apply for participation by completing a special form (Russian) published on the project website.

As I pointed out recently, open-source software in schools isn't just a good idea, it's becoming a financial necessity if we're to keep enough teachers for our kids in classrooms. So, it's particular good timing that Sugar Labs and openSUSE have released free Linux distributions expressly designed for education.

Russian Linux software developers have created an alliance to jointly participate in tenders to supply schools with open source software. The total number of specialist entering the alliance has exceeded the given number in Mandriva and Ubuntu Canonical producer, all in all.