Techbowl

Current efforts to offer Israeli school’s an Open Source CMS have the potential of solving, altogether, many of the problems that we face today at schools.

Our on-going attempts to implement a GNU/Linux at schools have involved a considerable overhead, and unless its backed by substantial funding and especially the approval and commitment of the Ministry of Education or other powerful organizations like Match (CET – Center for Educational Technology), its bound to involve considerable and draining efforts. It takes time before the system is smoothly integrated with the schools system, and training must take place (we’ve been putting much efforts on building such a training program for school system administrators, teachers and off-course children, you can see these efforts here).

One of the major reasons Ort Hatzor High School was interested in a Linux Terminal Server (LTSP) system was the promise they’d be able to add additional computer stations for teachers loading exam results, especially during the crowded exam period. The only problem was, The Ort portal is only compatible with Explorer. We could not find a way to overcome the issue of loading exam results to the mutual Ort respiratory.

CMS’s Iv’e seen gathering pace and fund, in the last year or so, like Drupal, Joomla — which rumor says you’ll be in pains trying to get support for, and Lahak which unlike the other two is a native Hebrew CMS overcoming bidi problems, all have the potential to be comparably, low resource intensive, overcome schools sticky layer, while solving Web Site Standartization issues that are unfortuantly so common in Israeli Web Sites.