Smart School Budget-Cutting with Free Open-Source Software

I've been doing radio news-writing and announcing on weekends for the past few months - English teachers, all that teaching of writing and speaking really is a transferable skill-set - and the job started about the same time as the global economic crisis. Bad economic news dominates our top-of-the-hour newscasts to the degree we call them "the slit-your-wrist updates." Gloom, gloom.

Skimming the Education Week digest of "Education and the Financial Crisis" articles, I can only say I'm glad I don't have to announce them too. I'd choke up as I read. Budget axes falling, student homeless rates rising (and by the way, the National Council of Homeless Education has a site with information on how children and youth whose families have lost their home to foreclosure may qualify for services under the McKinney-Vento Act. If you have homeless children in your classes, their parents should know about this, and from what I'm reading, most parents don't).

I want to hear first-hand accounts not only of how the crisis is affecting your school(s), but more importantly, any innovative measures your school, district, or state is taking to respond to the crisis in a way that minimizes the damage. There are better and worse ways to deal with lower budgets.

And I can offer one way to do that as I close.

Saving School Dollars with Free Software

Besides teaching English and history, I'm also a technology mentor, and I can't tell you how many hairs I've pulled while watching administrators sink tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into software that they can get for freaking free. Case in point: Blackboard, the e-learning software, costs upwards of $50,000, and does things no better (and arguably worse) than the Free Open-Source Software ("FOSS") called Moodle. Choosing Moodle saves one teacher salary right there.

That's just the tip of the iceberg.

Instead of paying for Microsoft Office, download Open Office for free. It's compatible with MS Office, so there's no cross-platform barriers. From document creation á la Word to presentations á la Powerpoint to spreadsheets á la Excel, Open Office does it all.

Want more? Instead of the ridiculously expensive Adobe Photoshop, try the free open-source Gimp and Gimp Animation. It doesn't stop there. Free software for administration, IT departments, anti-virus protection, math and science and foreign language teachers, audio and video editing and playback, and more is out there too - all thanks to the FOSS community. See these monster lists of FOSS offerings for more: For Windows/PC, here, here, and here. For Macs, see here, here, and here. For background on the FOSS movement, this Wikipedia entry serves admirably.

Knowledge is power - especially in the hands of administrators having to make tough budget choices. Help yours by giving them the knowledge to save dollars, without losing resources. And ask them to support FOSS by donating a small percentage of their savings to the development communities of the software they adopt.

What about you? Any other smart budgeting angles you can share?

Image by Chris Campbell
Thanks to Harold Jarche, djteach, Nathan Rein, S.P. Greenlaw,
and Adrian Bruce for the link-sharing Twitter-assists!