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

Seems to me that if these folks are teachers and not sys-admins there may be no quicker way of turning them off than showing 'pipe-work'.
Why not take for a voyage of exploration in space instead http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ to show the kind of software that you can get under open source and that demonstrates an important aspect of Open Source - that it can harness the skills of enthusiasts and specialists in ALL fields to provide educational material. It runs on Windows and *nix systems to minimize the road blocks to entry. There may be many better, more focused (but sexy) curriculum based apps that will do the same thing and that others can identify.
Lift the eyes, inspire don't grind 'em to death with detail. The real world will re-appear fast enough!
Good luck



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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