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)..."

A few growing pains aside, a Linux deployment in a Santa Rosa, CA elementary school district is maturing robustly, letting teachers and students stand apart from their previous dependence on Microsoft Windows while they try on new open software attitudes.

In my posts 11 Techy Things for Teachers to Try This Year and How To Do 11 Techy Things In the New School Year I mentioned podcasting and video creation. When creating podcasts and videos adding music and other sounds can enhance your students' presentations.

First distributives developed on the basis of Linux OS within the program to equip Russian schools with the open source software have been handed over to the informatics teachers in the Perm Region. The developers are sure their product will not only protect teachers from copyright advocates but might result in the technical literacy of pupils to improve.

Lake City, Florida USA is the home of a rather unconventional school, New Generation. It is a non-profit, private school for students grade 6th through 12th that are at risk of dropping out of school due to educational difficulties. With a maximum population of 60 students, New Generation has an astounding success rate amongst a category of students that most of society has given up on.

Can students be required to buy a particular product from a particular abusive company that virtually bribes teachers to achieve this?

This is an excellent guest post by Scott Rowed on the use of Linux in K-12 schools, including strong evidence that school districts that do not have students using the Linux operating system are placing their students at a disadvantage, as well as a description of one outstanding success story in British Columbia.

Remember back in 2008 when a teacher named "Karen" made a remark about using Linux holding her students back? The idea apparently being that students using Linux must somehow be participating in something that is illegal.