How Can Open Technologies Benefit K-12 schools?

• Cost: License Fees and TCO – Licensing and purchasing costs for proprietary technologies often limit the scope of use in educational settings. Open technologies, often blended with proprietary technologies, may provide a means for the use of technology in a more ubiquitous way for students and teachers by leveraging the funding available.
• Data integrity/interoperability – Data interoperability through open standards increases the efficiency of systems through the use of common data elements and ensures greater data integrity. These open standards assist in both proprietary and open-source applications working together in a blended technology environment.
• Independence and Flexibility – Because the source code is open, advanced users can customize applications and operating systems to their environment. This opens the door to innovation, which is in turn shared with others. Upgrades are voluntary, so users are not locked into continuing maintenance fees or enforced obsolescence.
• Stability and Reliability – There is high confidence that open source software will have a viable future because so many people are independently vested in it. It is stable because so many skilled developers are working on it and testing it in many different environments. Open-source operating system users report that their systems are more reliable, offer greater performance, are easier to manage, and provide better support.
• Broader Access to Information – Huge libraries of content are being assembled by organizations, agencies and individuals. Search engines make this quickly available at the point of instruction.
• Community Support – Content management systems make it easy to build attractive informational sites to communicate to the public. An informed community in turn supports schools.
• Engage Students in Collaboration – It's well documented that our students live in a world characterized by collaboration. They expect to be part of a larger community in the creation of knowledge, not just sharing, but actively contributing to the end result, whether it's the area of music, research or literature. The use of open technologies in education reinforces that view of the world and encourages students and teachers to be active members of the global community typically involved in the creation of these technologies.