Cardiffschools.net

From Schoolforge-UK

Case Study

Virtual Cardiff School now known as cardiffschools.net

This is the system built on open source that allows 24,000 students and 2,000 staff in the Cardiff area to access their schools FROM home.

Every user has an individual e-mail address and their own web site. We do not use ftp but a drag and DROP windows environment to make life easy for everybody.

We interface directly with the schools management software which means a student entering the schools has an account as soon as the SIMs is updated.

It also allows us to run an intelligent mail system where you address an email to, say, all in year 7 or Reg GROUP 5 and the server works out the distribution list - there is no need to have an address book.

Given any user can then send an email to "all in school" it could provoke SPAM. There too we have a novel approach. Any teacher receiving what they consider to be SPAM can simply forward it to user SPAM. The mail system then removes all copies of that mail FROM all other mail boxes.

Every school also has a streaming video server - which we are experimenting with at present.

The system also provides users with personal and GROUP file space, a personal desktop comprising timetable, email client, web upload, powerful search tools and communication software.

We are also working on a free on-line training programme to cover the European Computer Driving License - based only on open source (with an edition in Welsh). Any help gratefully received.

Richard Wenner <richard.wenner at btinternet.com>