Teachers and Edubuntu and more

[Steve Rippl]

David Groos wrote:
> What do you think?  Should we expand our community with additional 
> channels of communication specifically designed for 'teachers'?  
> Should we seek to invite educational researchers into our community?  
> Any proposal such as this is fraught with the dangers and benefits of 
> change.  What are the risks and what are the benefits as you see them? 
I whole heartedly agree with the spirit of this, and I'll just chime in 
with a bit from the School District Tech Director perspective (not 
developer, not teacher, just the guy in the middle!)

Most teachers, even the really tech savvy ones that we have, aren't 
going to want to get onto any irc channel, especially one that has 
developers talking 'geek'.

A separate mailing list for 'Edubuntu in action' sounds like a good 
idea, and if that's already there with ubuntu-education all well and 
good.  Looking back a little on it's archives it looks like the place a 
teacher would go.  Who "oversees" this list?  I would think to make it 
effective for what I'm imagining all tech related queries would have to 
be directed to another list to encourage this one to remain focused on 
the education aspect.  Anyway, I just subscribed to see for myself! 

I think the idea of using Moodle to develop further resources is an 
excellent one.  I have a number of teachers using Moodle in their 
classrooms and thin-clients for student access to it all.  They're at a 
Middle/High School level, so the emphasis isn't about how to use this 
app or that app so much, but rather how utilize these tools to get 
across your curriculum, how to manage a class in a lab environment, what 
other online or local app resources are available and applicable.  So I 
think a conversation needs to happen with teachers about their 
perspective, what is the help/support/encouragement/tools that they need. 

So what can I offer?  Well between myself and some of our teachers we 
have quite a bit of Moodle experience.  I can also try to persuade some 
of our more "up-for-it" teachers to tune into a mailing list and chime 
in with their views (I said try, teachers are a group that already feel 
pushed and don't often want to take on even more!).  Where should this 
happen?

Overall I think getting more input from teachers and researchers would 
be great.  Having teachers start to feel part of the community based 
around the tools they use would be fantastic!

Steve

-- 
Steve Rippl
Technology Director
Woodland Public Schools
360 225 9451 x326