Re: [school-discuss] Bouncing ideas around:

[Daniel Howard <dhhoward@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sharon Betts wrote:
> The best examples come directly from the NETS website.  This one for
> example:
> http://cnets.iste.org/students/pdf/6-8BirthstoneProject.pdf
> Tools and Resources
> SOFTWARE:
>  Word-processing, database, presentation, Web page creation
>  We need to add:
> OO 
> NVU
> To just have a list of opensource word-processing, database, presentation
> apps. without the curriculum directed at the standards, you will not
> influence the teachers in the trenches.  
> If the example projects on NETS could all be completed using OpenSource,
> that would be a great start.
>
> Sharon

Ah, now I understand, and I think this is the type of example to which 
Justin was referring regarding content: having OpenSource apps *and* 
templates for these type of projects would greatly facilitate such 
projects.  I went through this thought process below for some content 
for my daughter's elementary school class, and discovered exactly what 
Justin and Sharon are describing: to generate content, there are several 
applications that have to be used, and the process is likely *not* 
teacher-friendly at this time.  Story below, but bottom line is that I 
figured out how to generate public domain content using Impress, 
Inkscape and public domain clipart that is in .svg format.  Now the 
question is where to post it, and whether I can jumpstart some content 
and get a few technology savvy teachers at our school to reproduce it, 
modify it, and expand it for use by less technically savvy teachers both 
at our school and worldwide.

Daniel

Details:

Since my kid is in elementary school, I tend to focus on individual 
software applications as opposed to office apps with templates, but I 
see now that both will be required for the general case.  In fact, after 
Sharon's note, I started to imagine using Impress (OpenSource 
presentation app) for younger kids who are learning sight words and to 
make it easy for the teachers to modify the content: put together a 
bunch of slides with clip art objects and text words, and on the first 
slide, the words are associated with the correct clip art.  On the next 
slide, the words are on one side of the slide and the art on the other; 
the kids are to group the art objects with the correct words, merely by 
moving the objects around on the slide in edit mode.  Wouldn't have the 
automatic grading and tracking features of many proprietary software 
packages, but combined with a large database of clip art, teachers could 
do any words they chose, and combine the exercise with more 'project' 
oriented activities like 'learning about places to go and things to do 
there'.

I did some checking and the first stumbling block was that Impress lacks 
the large database of clip art that M$ Powerpoint accesses via the web. 
 There is an open clip art repository,

http://www.openclipart.org/

but the issue is that the images are in .svg format, which Impress does 
not yet recognize.  Solution currently proposed is to use another 
opensource application like Inkscape:

http://www.inkscape.org/

to convert the .svg files into .png files.  A laborious process, but 
that way, the images are in the public domain, and so the content 
generated using them can also be put in the public domain.

Again, there's probably specific applications that do this with a fixed 
base of words, and if you're more technical you could modify the data 
base and add images, but since most teachers I'm guessing by now can 
build slides in a presentation application if they had access to the 
content (in this case clip art geared towards sight words), this 
approach makes it easier, and uses open source applications and public 
domain content.

In the future, I'd hope that direct access to public domain clip art 
becomes part of open source presentation software, but until then, it's 
probably up to folks like us to help teachers in the process.