I work in the UK post compulsory sector (18+ basic skills teaching, aka adult education, mostly maths), so not the primary age focus of the OA. A few reflection

I work in the UK post compulsory sector (18+ basic skills teaching, aka adult education, mostly maths), so not the primary age focus of the OA. A few reflections after the organisations I work for pivoted at a month's notice to 100% online delivery: Most of the students I see use their phones as the main Web access device (zoom online classes + video lessons + pdf files for documents and all). Touch screen/direct manipulation UI is were it seems to be at. Students like drawing on my slides. I work with a teacher who makes extensive use of Google's Jamboard (Please don't cancel this project!!!) to check understanding. Each student in an online class of 10 can have a copy of a problem on their own page in Jamboard and show their working. One of my employers IT dept (Microsoft shop all through, 1500+ client PCs) was happy to make OpenOffice(*)/GIMP/Inkscape available on the network. Students discovered the packages themselves and some used them without realising that they could have their own copies at home for nowt. The other employer has gone Microsoft 365 total with Teams and all. The Web based office applications allow students to produce basic docs and keep the resulting files in their online storage. Few problems so far. Some integration with Moodle for course pages. A large College locally uses Google Education to provide similar facilities. Students who take courses from both institutions seem to work well with the two different systems. I think people in these days of mobile devices are less dependent on one UI. Addressing the OA's main point: yes I think we could use more open source OS and applications in schools. Chromebooks are almost there when you think about it. BUT I suspect the future is Web apps. Contrast geogebra(1) with Logo(2) (and I think there is room for both) (1) https://www.geogebra.org/calculator https://www.geogebra.org/calculator (2) https://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/what_is_logo/logo_programming.html https://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/what_is_logo/logo_p... Meta: I had to use links -dump https://tdarb.org/posts/schools.txt https://tdarb.org/posts/schools.txt | fmt | less to read the OA. Lines just too long on graphical Web browser.