Edubuntu Ideas, Advocacy, and so forth

[Krsnendu dasa]

I agree that some platform for creating tests and activities would be great.

My basic ideas is a matching principle. i.e. match a picture with a
word or a sound.
e.g. a word is spoken in Sanskrt the students click one picture (or
word) out of 4 that are shown.
e.g. Similarly, hear "one half" click on the symbol or a graphic
representation of it.
If teachers can choose the text, pictures and audio for their own
matching games it would be great.

On 20/10/2007, Gavin McCullagh <gmccullagh at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Tue, 16 Oct 2007, David Trask wrote:
>
> > I have a bazillion ideas for things that we need to work on for Edubuntu.
> > Not many are programming so much as marketing, advocacy, support and so
> > forth.  I'm soliciting ideas from all of you (as an educator/IT support
> > person) to bring up for discussion and work at the Ubuntu Developers
> > Summit in just over a week (programming ideas welcome as well).
>
> I think there was a reasonable subset of the attendees in Sevilla who
> agreed that what Edubuntu needed was to start focussing on the education
> side of things.  A capable desktop is now available from the main ubuntu
> project and the addition of LTSP certainly makes for more efficient and
> cost-effective maintenance and hardware use.  However Edubuntu lacks
> something that you can point teachers to and say "this is why we're using
> edubuntu, it's clearly better for education".
>
> With that in mind, I've a few suggestions.
>
> == A Teachers' Platform? ==
> While the static content-driven stuff like kde-edu is nice, I don't think
> it addresses education on computers as schools would want it.  Every
> country has its own language and curriculum and every teacher teaches at
> different levels so they really need to be empowered to create their own
> content.
>
> I may be totally wrong on this, but a platform which allows the
> non-technical teacher to easily put together their notes, quizzes, extra
> material, etc. and for which a publisher or country's education authority
> can devise content for all students would be very useful.  You might argue
> that moodle already does this and you might argue that SCORM is the format.
> You may be right, though I'm not sure that many teachers (ordinary
> teachers, not technophiles) would really agree.  Moodle may be the display
> platform, but it's not the editor for this process.  That means a
> non-technical teacher must master use of a SCORM creator and moodle.  The
> chances of this are remote.  Here are two SCORM creation tools which I
> think could be radically improved upon.
>         http://www.reload.ac.uk/ldeditor.html
>         http://exelearning.org/
>
> == FOSS Literacy Software ==
> This is needed in my 1st World country and I'm pretty sure it must be
> relevant in others, not to mention the developing world.  A multi-lingual
> Literacy platform which could change its language, look and content to suit
> the age-group/location/language of the user would be an awesome
> contribution to the planet.
>
> == Computing Tutors ==
> Almost no technical computing is taught in a lot of countries until
> University level.  If tutor programs were available on the desktop which
> keen students could sit down and learn from, that would be really
> fantastic.  Years ago, I learnt HTML from this website:
>         http://www.case.edu/help/introHTML/toc.html
> Many people would consider this a bit primitive now, but it was a really
> great tutor and I learnt HTML in a few afternoons using it.
>
>
> Some of these are pretty lofty requests and maybe some readers will have
> fallen off their chair laughing.  I think edubuntu needs to have high
> ambitions for education or else we will just spend 6 month periods waiting
> for the next new firefox and openoffice versions, new artwork and a better
> functioning thin client.  All of those are great, but they're not
> interesting to a teacher.  Very few people seem to do computer-based
> education well, it's a tough problem in need of a good solution and the
> opportunity is there for anyone who can provide that solution.
>
> Apologies for a long email,
> Gavin
>
>
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