Re: [seul-edu] Home schooling pages

[Adam J Cody <acody@lucent.com>]

Hello to everyone again first of all. The last three months have been
the busiest in my life it seems, I hope to get a little more active on
the mailing list and the web site as well in the next couple of weeks.

First, home schoolers need apps to scale to their level. If everyone
apps was designed with one or more teacher and one or more student in
mind this would help. Don't lock me into fields that say student 1 and
teacher 1 or subject fields of Math, English, and so forth. Allow me to
customize the application for my needs at home. Two teachers - called
Mom and Dad. And two students called Alec and Anthony. 

Right now I use the spreadsheet functions in StarOffice to setup my
schedule and grading for my older son. This is not the easiest way but
the other grade books don't give me the ability to design what I did in
the spreadsheet. They don't scale down to my level. I have them on the
website if anyone wants to look at them. They are an older copy; my son
and I just started in December and have made some changes but those are
at home.  http://cran.seul.org/~acody/sheets/

My major concern is still preserving the "content" of what is available
now! Every week I seem to lose sites from my links that once had
"everything I needed for this lesson". Until lessons plans, content, and
the other various sources come up with a way to preserve the information
and then organize it I have little faith that the internet and computers
will be used much for homeschoolers. Something like sourceforge.net .
That is a successful working model that I believe could be used for
educational content and applications. I encourage everyone to look at my
links page as realize how much content is already done. Now remember, I
am the guy that also strongly believes that PDA, eBook, and Mobile Linux
devices will be what our children will be schooling with in a couple of
years. Books and teachers will find a different place in the educational
process. That new device by Erickerson using Mobile LInux and Curseo
would be perfect for my son if schooling books were available in a
suitable format and I could limit his online connections to a couple of
sites to also fulfill his educational needs.

I really would like to see this issue of content address more than
anything else. How do I format this content? What applications to write
content in the desired format? Where to host this content? What
organizational scheme to use for the content? And so forth.

I'll send this email out for now and see if it kicks up any discussion.  

Adam Cody

Doug Loss wrote:
> 
> I was fiddling around recently and again came across Adam Cody's pages
> <http://cran.seul.org/~acody/> on home schooling and Linux and open
> source software.  We had some discussion of that back in December (as I
> recall), but nothing much beyond that.  I think home schooling is an
> important (at least in the US) portion of the educational spectrum that
> we haven't paid much attention to.  I know that there were some other
> folks here who were interested in talking about that too, such as Petr
> Vicherek.  I'd like to start up a discussion on how the needs of home
> schoolers differ from those of more traditional schools, and how Linux
> and SEUL/edu might help address those needs.  Adam and Petr, could you
> start off?  And of course anyone else with experience, interest, or an
> opinion is welcome to join in.
> 
> --
> Doug Loss                 Even if you're on the right track,
> Data Network Coordinator  you'll get run over if you just
> Bloomsburg University     sit there.
> dloss@bloomu.edu                Will Rogers