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That could be solvable with something like cross-over: https://www.codeweavers.com/products/crossover-chromeos https://www.codeweavers.com/products/crossover-ch

That could be solvable with something like cross-over: https://www.codeweavers.com/products/crossover-chromeos https://www.codeweavers.com/products/crossover-chromeos Of course, in the context of low income, ideally the district would provide standardized choices or offer crossover as a supported alternative. I’m not familiar with this program, but it seems like Google has made efforts in this direction: https://edu.google.com/products/chromebooks/ https://edu.google.com/products/chromebooks/

shakna 7y ago
Generally speaking, proprietary educational software cannot run under Wine and friends, mostly because it tends to be rather poorly written in the first place, full of Undefined Behaviour. A lot of schools do generally offer standardised hardware & software. For example, at the last school I was admin at, we had a Lenovo range, and a series of programs to help poor families afford them. (Tablets at primary school, one kind of laptop at middle school and a more powerful laptop at senior school). However, I still, in three years, could not force around a dozen teachers to understand the limitations of their platform. Official policy was actually that a teacher may not use a piece of software without getting it approved by IT - so that we could check it was compatible, and automate rollout across all the devices. The problem, most simply put, is that teachers would get excited about a piece of software, build their entire curriculum around it, and not involve IT at any point in the process whilst simultaneously having no idea how software works. This sore point wasn't isolated at all either, at conference when the entire town's IT teams got together (we exchanged talking points, software and regularly donated our older hardware to less-well-off schools), it was the most common anecdote, followed up by most school administrations being entirely unwilling to have IT's back when we would be unable to deploy a particular teacher's favourite software that wouldn't run on the accepted platform.

shakna 7y ago

Generally speaking, proprietary educational software cannot run under Wine and friends, mostly because it tends to be rather poorly written in the first place, full of Undefined Behaviour. A lot of schools do generally offer standardised hardware & software. For example, at the last school I was admin at, we had a Lenovo range, and a series of programs to help poor families afford them. (Tablets at primary school, one kind of laptop at middle school and a more powerful laptop at senior school). However, I still, in three years, could not force around a dozen teachers to understand the limitations of their platform. Official policy was actually that a teacher may not use a piece of software without getting it approved by IT - so that we could check it was compatible, and automate rollout across all the devices. The problem, most simply put, is that teachers would get excited about a piece of software, build their entire curriculum around it, and not involve IT at any point in the process whilst simultaneously having no idea how software works. This sore point wasn't isolated at all either, at conference when the entire town's IT teams got together (we exchanged talking points, software and regularly donated our older hardware to less-well-off schools), it was the most common anecdote, followed up by most school administrations being entirely unwilling to have IT's back when we would be unable to deploy a particular teacher's favourite software that wouldn't run on the accepted platform.