Fair enough. I am in a parochial environment with my son, after
raising my daughter through the California public school system.
Probably not much difference in suburban schools in either state.
Since I judge at science fairs, I take my son with me, which gives him
a taste of measurable objectives, scientific method, and that sort.
His school has about 150 NT's for 370 grade school students K-8), plus
a full computer lab with a fulltime SysAdmin and a computer curriculum
instructor. Our plan is to move completely to Open Source in the next
three years. My first stint related to computers in education was at
Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium in the late 70's, where each
school had a few teletypes hooked up to a CDC Cyber 74. I conducted
full experimental studies of the effects on reading and math of the CCC
and Plato CAI with CDC workstations of the time. Because the findings
were so negative, they were quashed politically.
Aaron Tyo-Dickerson wrote:
Thanks for your feedback, Michael. As the author of that plan
indicated, this objective is actually straight from our New York State
standards. I also live and work in New York State and while I had
absolutely no input into the creation of these particular standards, I
think that the author's deliberate connection of her project to her
state's stated objectives is a significant improvement over
technology-for-technology's-sake implementations. (..which I do not
think anyone here is advocating, btw) I am not sure where you live or
what standards your state/country has in place, so I am not able to go
into offer any sort of comparison for this. I would welcome further
discussion on this topic in any case. Thanks again!
Aaron TD
Michael Dean wrote:
I experienced some exasperation at what the New York State calls an
"objective". As stated in the osed site, it is hardly what we would
call a SMART objective! Shouldn't sixth and ninth graders be used to a
tigher objective than these? I know my sixth grade son is.
Aaron Tyo-Dickerson wrote:
Thanks for this question, Michael (and your response, Cameron):
This is a limited project and while I used the entire Mozilla "suite"
(email, web, calendar, etc) and am very happy with it, the school's
expressed focus is on student use. They are very concerned
about email (and do not allow students to use it at all...sadly) and
were attracted to the "browser only" Firefox possibilities. We are,
however, planning an implementation of the QuickNote extension by the
end of the month as part of a plan put together by their library media
specialist. (The plan is available online here: http://www.osed.org/about/sscs/firefox.html
)
Aaron TD
Michael Dean wrote:
I am curious. why use firefox? Wouldn't it make more sense to use
the full mozilla, I would think a calendar would be helpful, as would
perhaps the ability of students to email within their network on work
teams ,etc. Any thoughts on this?
garry saddington wrote:
On Saturday 09 October 2004 21:53, Aaron Tyo-Dickerson wrote:
troy@banther-trx.homeunix.com wrote:
Hello everyone,
Is anyone on the list using completely open-source alternatives in
their schools? Specifically GNU/Linux and educational programs. I
would love to hear of the combinations, types of software, server setups.
Thanks,
Troy
Thanks for asking this question, Troy, as I have been meaning to join
the conversation with a similar inquiry. I work for a regional public
school consortium in Upstate New York and have been exploring FOSS
possibilities for our area schools.
We currently have one district piloting several FOSS apps on their
Windows PCs. Their "shortlist" includes OpenOffice, The Gimp and the
Firefox web browser. (Not a very daring move by the standards of the
FOSS community, perhaps, but pretty fringe stuff for this region.) At
the same time, another school district has contacted me with a request
very similar to what you ask here: Can I take a laptop PC, wipe its hard
drive and then created a FOSS-only educational computer?
While the obvious, short answer is "Yes, simply install any flavor of
Linux and then add some of the standard desktop apps (see the non-daring
list above) and *Presto* an 'educational computer'", the actual response
is "I am not sure." Schools have very specific needs and I have had
difficulty finding FOSS replacements for things like Inspiration, which
we rely on for graphic organizers / concept maps / idea webs. I have
searched SchoolForge and SourceForge and not found a similar product and
would love to know if there is one out there.
Aaron Tyo-Dickerson
Try Freemind at
http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
regards
garry
--
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lori damma fusmalu
Dasche mame came rilla
schursche saga moll vasvilla
suri pauge fuzmalu
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sabel ize spogagufti
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pozadau "
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