Garry Saddington is ICT co-ordinator at Skegness Grammar School. It is a specialist sports college and a specialist maths and computing college with nearly 800 pupils, and has a boarding provision for around 60. Alistair Crust is responsible for serving the technology needs of the Skegness Grammar School community. All the school’s 180 curriculum computers run GNU/Linux. These run as thin-clients using the Linux Terminal Server Project, which uses low power clients with most of the processing being done on fewer, more powerful, servers.

The school uses a very wide range of free and open source applications – in fact all of the curriculum requirements are met through free software, with OpenOffice.org offering the main office suite and the following software meeting all the needs of curriculum ICT. Gimp and Inkscape for graphics work, kdissert for mind mapping, Kjots for notetaking and planning, Planner for Gantt charting. Knoda and Rekall for database frontends, Zope for A level project work, Plone for content management, Synfig for animation, Cinelerra for video as well as many others. The school plans to install Moodle for next term and have it integrated with the in house MIS.

Background

In 2001, the school had an ageing Novell and Windows 98 curriculum network. This was clearly in need of an upgrade.

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