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

[Yishay Mor <y.mor@ioe.ac.uk>]

I would consider showing a collaborative system. Something that captures 
the spirit of "open" and "free" in its support for knowledge 
construction and learning, and not just in the technology. After all, I 
would be surprised if you managed to get a group of teachers excited 
about the BitTorrent protocol. With that in mind, I'd go for something 
like http://moodle.org/.

If you're dealing with math / science teachers, they might find our 
stuff interesting http://www.weblabs.org.uk/wlplone. Its a plone based, 
collaborative, constructionist, learning environment for maths and 
science. It could probably be used for, e.g.,  music education as well. 
Just that we're using it for these topics. If you do want to present it, 
buzz my & I'll give you a tour of the major tourist attractions.

- Yishay

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.
>
>
>  
--
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