Examples of Free Software in Schools (bottom-up)
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- LibreOffice as default office program on all maschines; GIMP, Inkscape, ... 
- Microcontroller/Electronics class with Arduino: https://de.wikibooks.org/wiki/Mikrocontroller
- Weekly free software workshop in a separate small network running Debian (debian-lan)
- School condsiders switching to free software completely next summer (currently M$ XP)


Problems
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Technical Problems
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 - Compatibility of formats (vender lock-in worked!): The school's administration uses documents in proprietary formats and warns to open them with OpenOffice because macros may be destroyed.
 - Proprietary educational software available only for proprietary systems. 


Psychological Problems
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Usually pupils/students do not have a problem with free software, but teachers   need to be convinced:

 - "Something that does not cost money cannot be of much worth."
 - "I do not want and have no time to learn another program."
 - Inorance and stupidity: "I am against the gratis culture in the internet." 
 - Afraid of getting into trouble when parts of their workflow (which they painfully got used to) needs to be changed.

Other issues
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Lots of competition from proprietary vendors which try to make the pupils use their brand from early on and fetch tax money from the public sector the easy way. (Same with school books, media, etc.).


Solutions and/or Recommendations
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Try to win your users with the free software philosophy. The philosophy is something proprietary systems can in no way compete with:

  - Learning together and from each other. 
  - Be able to explore things and look behind the scenes. 
  - No social discrimination, everybody can use the same software everywhere.
  - "Free software - free society" is more than a catchy slogan; this is getting more and more clear.
  - We want to teach general principles and universal competences, not "click instructions" (which will be useless with the next version).
  - Do not argue with monetary aspects, it is not important and people do not want the "cheap" solution.

Do not get into technical details - there will always be things that make problems, on any system. If people get the basic idea, they will except shortcommings (which are probably the reason of wrong decisions in the past).


Establishing Free Software Solutions through the Public School Administration (top-down)
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 - Strong influence of proprietary lobby groups.
 - Politicians and magistrates have no idea about free software.
 - Mainstream, no "own opinion", easily manipulated by "consultants".
 - ...