Re: [school-discuss] what pieces of software would you demo to K-12 teachers ?

[Larry Herbison <lfh@frbhg.net>]

Has anyone taken a look at XPde (http://www.xpde.com) with respect to 
luring reluctant Windows users? It is a sure-fire bone of contention 
between Linux purists and those who want to ease the discomfort of the 
uninitiated, but this thread brings it to mind because its aim is to 
make Linux as familiar as possible to Windows users and still offer the 
main benefits of using Linux. It is an X11 desktop environment that 
emulates the look-and-feel of Windows, but there is no effort (in the 
XPde project) to make Windows apps run on Linux.

That said, I've not had time to actually download it and see how far 
they are with it (current release is 0.4.0). Has anyone tried it?

Larry

On Feb 18, 2004, at 9:19 AM, Tim Mansfield wrote:

> Hi,
>
> If you had just a brief time in which to demo open source software to a
> bunch of K-12 teachers...
>
> ...(who were new to the whole OS thing, and not necessarily convinced 
> it was
> all that great)...
>
> ...the point being to wow them with what OS could do for them, so they 
> want
> to explore further...
>
> ... what pieces of software would you demo?  (Again, just briefly, so 
> they
> get the gist of what it does & how they'd really benefit.)
>
> Note #1: Part of the the point is some of their schools might accept 
> donated
> hardware in the near future, so if the K12 Linux Terminal Server or 
> Linux in
> general is to be an viable option, there needs to be a lot of 
> attraction to
> the software that can run on it.
>
> Note #2: I've glanced through SEUL/Edu.  The case studies are 
> appealing to
> sys admins more than to teachers, and the application list is not 
> ranked
> such that I can pick out, say, the 5 most popular.  I looked at the 
> reviews
> area, but the only one that jumped out as a clear winner there was 
> moodle,
> with several positive reviews.