[seul-edu] Free Education Project

["Jason Mellen" <jmellen@intellikey.com>]

Hello,

I am new to the group. I am a high school student who would love to see
Linux replace MacOS and Win32 for the campus. When I started writing a
homework manager for our website I began thinking of possible ways to expand
the ideas. Before I had ever read the editorial or knew that the group
existed I wrote a very rough draft of what I call the "Free Education
Project."

Now that I know that others have the same thoughts as me, I decided to send
the document to get some feedback. I am just looking to see what you think
of the basic train of thought.

Jason Mellen
Palm Bay High School - Melbourne, FL

p.s. sorry for the dos file format
Free Education Project 0.2
by Jason Mellen

	Public education has had a reputation for lack of funding for many years. It is disturbing that already limited funding is being spent on commercial education systems. This project aims to supply teachers, students, and parents with a free way to expand the knowledge of students without the pointless costs of software. Programs are being developed to help manage class roster and systems for homework management over the Internet. This suite of applications will be made to work together and provide a consistent experience. They will also be expandable and customizable by a system of scripting and plug-ins.  
	Much of the system will be based on or will interface with a the GNU/Gnome environment. Teachers can communicate with each other over a digital whileboard or embed a Gnumeric spreadsheet inside of a homework assignment. Imagine being able to run "make" and have it spit out a test for different classes by imputing homework assignment and other information about the recent lessons. Or to have a CVS server that hosts a student presentation. Each student could work on their own part and then simply add it to the group's work. Of course these are just possibilities. It does show, however, the future that the GNU environment has in education. 
	Teachers are very busy and the last thing they can afford to do is spend time updating data in five different programs. That is why integration is so important. A teacher's personal scheduler should be able to automatically update the schools web site with assignments. Or perhaps a student's planner can automatically retrieve the latest assignment and track their progress to make sure everything that needs to be done get done on time.
	I believe that free, open-source, software will be the future of computers and that education needs (for once) to stay caught up. Educators nor students cannot afford not to have this way of working.