edubuntu for day-care centers, philippines

[maning sambale]

edubuntu-devel,

Hello!

This letter is a bit long but please read on ....

We are a small unit in a University currently assisting poor
communities here in the Philippines for social action/community
service/extension work [1].  We have community partners in which we
assist in providing basic social services.  Recently, I wrote a letter
to our administrators in providing old PCs to our partner day care
centers.    These day care centers provide affordable primary
education to very poor children.  My personal initiative is driven by
my experience as a casual user of Ubuntu, the hole in the wall project
[2] in India and by my 4 year-old daughter urging me that their school
should have "tux" in their PCs. I was delighted when the University
pledged to provide old PCs (initially 6 units)!

As I was the person who initiated this (through the letter), I am
tasked to create a brief operational plan in order to coordinate the
tasks needed.  The basic plan is outlined below:

  1. installing free and open source educational software;
  2. designing resource materials and lessons plans;
  3. designing a monitoring mechanism to assess the effectiveness and
proper use of the equipment;

 I am writing this list to get feedback/comments/recommendations on
our plan.  Please find time to answer or point me where to get
responses.  I would also like to note that my experience with Ubuntu
and GNU/Linux (much more a sysad or a day care teacher) is very
limited and I have been googling for solutions for some time.

Here goes...

Installation and other things:

I am suspecting (no news from the University IT dept right now) that
the computers which will be donated will have 64-128 MB ram at about
5-10 gig of HDD without a CD drive and modem.  I am currently
reviewing the the Edubuntu docs [3] for advise in the installation.
My plan is to install Edubuntu on a stand alone workstation (LTSP is
not an option at the moment).

1. Will edubuntu run "comfortably" on a 64-128 ram?  Should I use xfce
as my desktop environment instead?
2. How much partitioning ratio should use for system, swap, home (I
intend to put /home on a separate partition)?
3. Which programs/applications should I remove to free up space (such
programs that may not be suitable for day-care envi for instance, or
those software pertaining to LTSP)?
4.  As part of the project I would also like to monitor how the PC are
being used (both by teachers and students).  One mechanism is to save
the syslog (possibly on a diskette) and send them to me for analysis.
How do I make a short scripts that does the following: create a text
file of programs accessed by the user (much the same as a gcompris.log
file) and regularly save them in a designated directory in /home on a
predefined dates (maybe monthly or bi-monthly)?  Any tips/experience
in doing this for child-related programs?  I want to know the
frequency of use of the programs as well as their level of
understanding.
5.  Since this will be a stand-alone workstation w/o a cd and Internet
connection, how do I regularly update and fix?

Supplemental resource materials:
We also want to support the teachers in designing and creating lesson
plans and resource materials that will make full use of the equipment.
 Some thoughts here are:
1. How much time should the students be in the computer for a given week?
2. On what certain subject matter should computer use be appropriate
for inclusion?
3. Any links references on computer use for ages 5-8 years old?
4. As this is an offline workstation, we also plan to archive some
interesting web materials that the children can browse even though
there is no internet connection.  Some interesting things I found on
the web are the International Children's Digital Library [4] and
matemania - hurtigmeny [5].  However, most are copyrighted and does
not allow archiving the whole site offline.  Can you give me some
links I can look into that can be freely distributed?  It could be
reference materials, interactive games (flash maybe), e-story books,
etc.

That's about it for now.  Please respond on any of your
thoughts/experiences. If in case this project would prove successful
we intend to request for more old PCs and distribute them to other
community managed schools, wish me luck!


Cheers,

Maning


 ----
 [1] http://cosca-dlsu-cwts.wikispaces.com
 [2] http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/
 [3] https://wiki.edubuntu.org/HowToCookEdubuntu/Chapters
 [4] http://www.childrenslibrary.org/
 [5] http://www.matemania.no/matemania_m/index2.html

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