Schools Should Exclusively Use Free Software (2014)
Speaking as a student whose school primarily uses Google&#x27;s suite (classroom, meet, etc..) but still has a few older solutions, some of which are free software, I can say that there&#x27;s a common argument that schools should focus on pragmatism and working with what they have - the age-old argument that free software still is not accessible or easy to use. I don&#x27;t beleive that this is still an issue.<p>Out of my current teachers and teachers I&#x27;ve had in the past, almost all of them were vocal about not liking Classroom or just didn&#x27;t use it. It is basically a small layer on top of Google Drive &amp; Meet that does not integrate anything nearly well enough. Most of my teachers seem to prefer Canvas, a free software solution to this, because it has more features. My teachers primarily cited the integrated quiz&#x2F;test system as its biggest draw when I asked.<p>Classroom is also is very difficult for less-privileged students to use - speaking as someone who used to rely on a 4 GB of RAM netbook with a Pentium and was still using it for part of this quarantine, even with Linux things really get slow. This could primarily be attributed to relying on a lot of Google tabs at once (for Drive, forms for quizzes, etc) while Canvas I&#x27;ve never had to open more than a few maximum. My only other option is to buy a Chromebook and while my school can afford Chromebooks for every student, many students are relying on just using what they have.<p>With that, I don&#x27;t think that the proprietary software really has all too much of an advantage in terms of pragmatism (which imo is even more important in schools). I don&#x27;t think the usual arguments against adoption of free software really seem to hold up, though I assume that cost might be an issue that I&#x27;m not aware of seeing my district is rather rich.<p>I&#x27;d love to hear more teachers opinions on this. Hopefully this gave you an idea of how education tech is from a student user&#x27;s endpoint.