For school IT administrators, summertime is usually spent at work rather than on the beach. Many technologists who work in K-12 education use the months of July and August to brush up on technical skills, take classes, run summer computer camps, and most importantly, to test, install and integrate new technologies that will be used in the fall when the kids come back to school.

Procurement also is a big part of the summer break, as orders for new computers and network gear are made; Apple, a longtime K-12-focused company, knows this and put its new education-focused $900 iMac on the market, aimed at classrooms and computer labs.

But more K-12 IT pros are also looking at open source tools as a way to deploy advanced, secure and feature-rich technology inside schools. Our recent story on the Needham Public Schools gives examples of one school district that's seeing cost savings from tools such as ASSP for spam filtering and radmind for software distribution, as well as MySQL databases. Also, James Gaskin's recent blog entry on open source and schools has a lively discussion going on the pros and cons and the reality of trying to get teachers to use Linux desktops or open source software. One comment-maker points to a Google group specifically devoted to the subject: groups.google.com/group/k12opensource.

So far this summer, the marketplace for open source has also become more promising for K-12 organizations. Microsoft's decision to finally support the OpenDocument format could help spur more OpenOffice pilots in schools where Microsoft has a strong grip. The imminent release (later this month) of Vyatta's open source router product - which promises to turn commodity PCs into high-powered WAN routers - could be another way to weave open source technology into a K-12 infrastructure, while squeezing out cost.