Educational software discussion from seul-research

[Doug Loss <dloss@csrlink.net>]

Pete St. Onge wrote:
> 
>              Granted - the use of computers in most classes is still
>         at the introductory phase. What I think would be really useful
>         is some sort of toolset or wizard to help develop teaching
>         tools. Some 4GL-like metatool that a non-programmer teacher can
>         use to create the opportunity to reinforce classroom
>         instruction for every student while still remaining challenging
>         for the students who catch on more rapidly.
> 
Well, there's Metacard (commercial, although reasonably priced for the
K12 crowd) and Visual Tcl (an IDE for Tcl/Tk development).  Of the two,
I'd say that Metacard is more likely to be easily useable by
non-programmer teachers.

[...]

> Does it produce a report on the student's progress though the task for
>      later analysis?
> 
It seems like Micah's menu program did some of this (do I remember
rightly, Micah?).

[...]

>     It seems that there would be the opportunity for a whole open-source
> effort to develop these and other educational tools. Just a thought.
> Most importantly, though, even though I removed the existing questions
> from the survey, I really would like to put good educational software
> questions on the survey. My concern is that we may not do the subject
> any favours if we don't put good questions on the survey. Reactions,
> ideas, suggestions? I would really like to pursue this ...
> 
I think my previous message about different meanings for "educational
software" fits here too.  I'm going to copy this to the seul-dev-apps
mailing list, as I think it's appropriate there.  Roger, are there
people around SEUL who are only on one list or the other?  If not, this
is probably not useful.  If so, the discussion might develop in two
different directions on the two lists.  Readers, if you reply to this
message be sure to remove the "To:" address of the other mailing list. 
There's no reason to clog a list with off-topic messages when there's a
perfectly good on-topic list right there.

-- 
Doug Loss                 It is impossible to imagine Goethe
Data Network Coordinator  or Beethoven being good at billiards
Bloomsburg University     or golf.
dloss@bloomu.edu                H. L. Mencken