Georgia Open Source Education Foundation

About GOSEF
History
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Accomplishments
Contact Us
How to Setup a Single K12LTSP Class
How to Convert an Entire School
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About Georgia Open Source Education Foundation - GOSEF

Our mission is to promote and sustain the use of Open Source Software through advocacy, outreach, support, and the recycling of donated computers. Our customers include schools, Boy's and Girl's clubs, YM/WCAs, churches, day care centers, and other organizations where computers are used to educate and train students and adults.

History

In May 2005, the PTA and principal of Morris Brandon Elementary School in Atlanta, GA asked two parent volunteers, Daniel Howard and William Fragakis, for advice on what kind of new computers they should buy for the classrooms with some money left over from the previous year's fundraising. The parent volunteers there had been spending increasing amounts of time trying to keep the Win95/98 classroom PCs afloat, but losing the battle. So they said, whoa, let's step back and look at the real problems we're having, and see what we should spend our money on. They discovered that teachers typically only had 1-2 working PCs per class, and they were slow, frequently frozen, and fraught with hardware, software, and malware issues. They also discovered that teachers primarily used the PCs for web browsing, office applications, and a reading and math application called Accelerated Reader/Math, that was about to convert to web based delivery. Hence, all critical school applications could also be delivered by open source software (OSS).

After doing some research over the summer of 2005, they found the K12LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) Open Source Software (OSS), that basically converts aging PCs into thin clients that boot off the network, and includes dozens of educational software applications, with a strong emphasis on math and science. They made a presentation, called other principals who had switched to the system and reported great success and improved performance using OSS, and thus convinced the principal and PTA to fund a testbed. Based on the successful demonstration of reviving old PCs in the school in the testbed, they then converted the computer lab to OSS/thin clients, and finally deployed K12LTSP servers throughout the school, converting the 7-10 year old classroom PCs into thin clients. They also sought donations of older PCs from businesess and received over 100. A Pentium II 350 MHz PC works just fine as a thin client, and businesses normally have to pay to have them hauled off. Since the software is free and open source, there are no licensing issues (or cost), and they can freely provide the software to parents to use at home. Bottom line is the school went from maybe one working PC per classroom to now 5-6, with some classrooms having 8-9. They also had a cable modem installed to improve network access speed, which was typically dialup speeds before and is now regularly 8-9 Mbps. Linux plus faster access speed gives blazingly fast web page loads. They used the OSS apps Squidgard and DansGuardian to do web site blocking and content filtering.

The results have been impressive: one first grade teacher's class took 1st place nationally on the First-In-Math web site that year, her neighbor was 3rd place and several other teachers were in the top five nationally or statewide. In a 4th grade class, after they built a mobile laptop cart with 12 laptop thin clients and a Linux server to add to their 9 existing thin clients, making a 1:1 ratio, within a week several students had doubled their scores on First-In-Math. They also set up a file server and a remote access server using Linux so that students can log in on any school PC to access their work, and can also log in from home using the FreeNx OSS application and run the applications as if they were sitting at a school PC, save their work to the school file server, and their Internet access is through the school's filtering system so parents can be assured that the access is safe. Now that all work is centralized, they can provide CDs to parents at the end of the year with a student's digital portfolio of work for the entire year.

The district information technology folks were impressed: The parent volunteers met with the district IT folks every week after initial deployments to show them what they did, how it would scale to 90 schools, how much money they could save and how much reliability could be improved district wide. The district is now planning a pilot school rollout of K12LTSP to 6 other schools in the City of Atlanta. In the process, Howard met James Kinney, III through the Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts group, and Jim is now helping the district in their pilot rollout through his company, Local Net Solutions.

After seeing the tremendous benefits of Open Source Software for their school, and after meeting Scott Belford (the founder of the Hawaii Open Source Education Foundation), Daniel Howard, William Fragakis, and James Kinney, III decided to form a similar organization here in Georgia to promote Open Source Software use and education.

Volunteer

GOSEF needs computer users that are willing to learn about open source and Linux through our web site tools, workshops, introductory classes, and other open source related events. We can also use leaders who can help organize and manage logistics of events. When we do an installation, our strong preference is to have at least one person in the organization who can be trained and will spread the knowledge to others in the organization. Our volunteers perform the following activities:

Accomplishments

Conversion of Morris Brandon Elementary School

which led to Decision of Atlanta Public Schools to pilot open source software in 6 other schools OpenOffice.org slideshow presented to the CIO of Atlanta Public Schools
You can download OpenOffice.org office suite from here and begin experiencing the power and flexibility of Open Source software.

Contact Us

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer: Daniel Howard
Vice President and Chief Technology Officer: William Fragakis
Vice President and Director of Engineering: James Kinney, III
Treasurer: Alix Howard
Webmaster and Public Relations Officer: Virginia Kinney