RE: [school-discuss] Feedback needed from teachers for the

["Ken Kousky" <kenkousky@hotmail.com>]

That's right on target for the US as well - if you look at the Learning
Company as an example they have great "neural candy" and like it or not,
that is the standard we have to play to .. I teach twice a week at an
urban high school and these kids are very technologically aware. The
challenge is to be both engaging AND meaningful.

In prior work I did at Wave we explored taking old games and adding
challenge questions, increased directions to read and type - remember,
simply improving reading vocabulary and speed is a real challenge.

Lets be creative and break some serious ground - if we build good
outcomes, open source wins. If we think open source first, we often
build inferior products. It's not what's on SourceForge that we can use
- it's what do we need to build for schools, then we leverage the
community to make that happen.

KWK

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-schoolforge-discuss@schoolforge.net
[mailto:owner-schoolforge-discuss@schoolforge.net] On Behalf Of
Anne-Marie MAHFOUF
Sent: Friday, April 05, 2002 7:09 AM
To: ninti@ninti.com; schoolforge-discuss@schoolforge.net
Subject: Re: [school-discuss] Feedback needed from teachers for the

> The biggest and popular educational software in demand today (in
> Australian schools at least, things like Kahootz, Kidspiration,
> mind-mapping software, etc) are not flashcard programs. Open
> source, in my opinion, needs software to compete with products
> like these, and they should be web based. If anyone is interested
> in building a web application along these lines using Perl,
> Python or PHP, count me in. My own humble contribution in this
> area is a web-based student newspaper application that allows
> kids to publish text and graphics to a school web-magazine. It is
> not rocket-science, it is pretty basic, but quite young kids can
> use it and it works (see
> http://ninti.com/schools/larapinta/nintinews/ ). What it needs
> is: conferencing with teacher/peers, spell checking, etc.

This is OK for schools with an internet connection.  In the KDE-Edu
project, we ruled out web-based programs because the vast majority
of schools we aim to reach does not have an internet connection.
KDE is a world-wide project, translated in more than 50 languages.

I think that schools in the USA or Australia obviouly don't need the
kind of software we aim to produce and even don't find it
interesting.

I would like to know if this list is only for people from developed
countries.  In this case, I have nothing to do with it. When I see a
lengthy thread about gradebooks stuff, I am sorry to say that it
does not concern the majority of people in the world who don't use
gradebooks in schools.

Anne-Marie