| Private St. Louis school goes Linux |
Jul. 01, 2008
A private school in St. Louis, Mo. is increasingly choosing Linux for the computers it supplies to students and faculty, according to laptop supplier Lenovo. Students at the Whitfield School are using Linux about 86 percent of the time now, Lenovo says, up from 50 percent three years ago.
Lenovo has supplied about 600 laptops to the Whitfield School, it says, including systems that run both Linux and Windows. Whitfield started its PC program in 2005, and this year achieved its goal of supplying each student in grades six through 12 with their own laptop, it says.
Citing a study done by the Whitfield School, Lenovo says that by the end of 2006, "students using ThinkPads spent 50 percent of their time on the PC in the Linux environment." That figure reportedly increased to 75 percent by the end of 2007, and 86 percent by the end of 2008.
Mike Schmedlen, education industry executive for Lenovo believes that Linux adoption in schools is on the rise, in part because Linux PCs work well with educational management software like Blackboard and the open source Moodle course management stack. He commented, "We're seeing a groundswell movement toward Linux and open source in education. Schools want to supply a twenty-first century computing environment."
The Whitfield School is an exclusive private school, but Linux uptake is also happening in public school systems, according to Schmedlen. He said, "The San Diego Unified School District has a program for 1:1 computing [story], and it is migrating exclusively toward Linux."
Alex Inman, diretor of technology at the Whitfield School, stated, "Lenovo support for Linux has helped us achieve our 1:1 computing goals within the first three years of the Whitfield PC program."
Translation: The school was set on supplying Linux, and being able to buy off-the-shelf systems pre-installed with Linux enabled them to do so much faster. Lenovo began pre-installing SUSE on select ThinkPad models in August of 2007, just prior to the beginning of the school year.
-- Henry Kingman
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