Gosh, I would love to be in that situation. As you can seen from the
Firefox project I mentioned earlier in this thread, this is a
reluctant-to-change region and this little project, small as it seems,
is going to rattle a few cages in this rural school district here in
Upstate New York. We are approaching FOSS not as a result of our
region's current high-levels of technological achievement and
expertise, because this is certainly not the case here, but rather as a
means of leap-frogging over these roadblockers and moving ahead.
To this end, this Firefox implementation project (which, it should be
stressed, is not a lesson plan) has as its goals tool-training,
a specific task-to-be-improved (web research) and a broadly defined
awareness of FOSS piece. The author has a real uphill struggle ahead of
her on this (as the project plan indicates in the "Challenges to be
faced" section) and I have encountered the predicted resistance as I
have begun to work with her to implement this plan.
Aaron TD
Michael Dean wrote:
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?
--
"Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem."
William of Ockham (ca. 1285-1349)
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