Re: [seul-edu] High School Educational Programs

[Chris Hornbaker <chrishornbaker@earthlink.net>]

Jennifer wrote:
> I am curious.  What type of COmputer programs do High Schools use? I
> remember using Adam for my Anatomy class in High school but that's about
> all i think (that was 6 years ago)
> I am sure we have some programs developing in Open Source for such
> things, but I am curious which ones are actually for High Schools thare
> aren't just learning programming.

Word Processors, grading tools (some teachers are really lazy:) lol), 
graphing tools, mail clients, student/teacher database/ user ID and password 
database, accounting software (quicken?), web browser, graphics tools (art 
class), video/audio editing (adv. communication), drum emulator ?(music?), 
html editor (web design), c++ compiler (computer programming, i don't think 
very many high schools teach anything else), LOTS OF ADOBE since many schools 
use pdf, power point (MS Office), many server applications (such as 
UID/password auth.), the list goes on.

Schools really use a lot of things that people don't think they would. Many 
things aren't in people's everyday life so its easy to look them over.

To penetrate the school systems we need to:
1) provide a way to easily convert from programs they use now (such as power 
point to the KPresentation format) <---most important
2) have the same functionality as the programs they originally used
3) make the programs easy to implement along side the current software
4) show an overall advantage in everyday tasks using "our" software
5) CAUSE NO PROBLEMS WHAT SO EVER (meaning, when version 1.0 is released it 
should be flawless and not affect the other current systems/software)
6) manage and track what students do <--(porn sites, viruses, a.k.a. stuff 
they shouldn't be looking at or doing)
7) incorporate strict rules into the software as who can do what (example: i 
see many students watching flash cartoons when they should be reading the 
curriculum (Cisco networking))
8) allow the admin to easily take away certain privledges when a student 
breaks a rule that the school has set out about computer use using a "simple" 
program (something like a perl script and an html front-end would probably do 
the trick)

If all of those are met then it shouldn't be much harder to go around and 
show them how it could benefit them.

Chris