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



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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