Remind me again how much money Firefox nets each year...

Got CalemEAM running over here. It has a massive number of features, but you can limit it to only the work order portion if need be. Open source and super customizable: http://eam.calemeam.com/eam/

I worked for many years as a systems/network administrator for the school district in my area. Through that and my engagement to a school teacher, my passion for technology in education has grown tremendously. Unfortunately, the biggest problem that I was always facing came mostly from the administration.

Some of the older school district administrators believe technology in the classroom to be an educational distraction, and at that point, the funding just isn't there. A superintendent who doesn't feel the technology belong just don't want to pay for it.

After I was given the funding, or sorted out grants on my own accord, it came down to the teachers. Most of the teachers I was involved with just didn't care about the technology. They weren't interested in using it or learning it so they weren't even going to begin to teach it. Some of it came from very little personal exposure to technology, some from the general "well I just don't see the need" mentality, but most came from the fact that they have very little time to get to it.

To expose the teachers to the technology, I would hold training courses designed around commonly used applications for both teacher and student use. These would be open to any of the staff. This had limited success at first, but after they started to see the benefit from those who were putting it into practice, more began to show up.

To deal with the time constraints, I would center the trainings around integrating technology into the everyday instruction. The use of Smart Boards or Mimios for presentations and interactive lessons on the board was very effective. The other was the hugely successful implementation of Moodle and the beginning of the deployment for Mahara (both of which can be found at www.moodle.org and www.mahara.org respectivly). Moodle allowed entire lessons with video, interactive flash activities, assignments, quizzes, and just about anything else you can think of to be available in class, after class, before class, or whenever. Mahara was our branch away from MySpace. The students felt connected to it in a similar way, but it was a controlled environment focused on education.