Ubuntu in Education resources from Canonical

[Jack ODonnell]

Belinda

Your work and efforts are greatly appreciated by our organization

The World Computer Exchange is a global education & environment
nonprofit that helps connect youth in 71 developing countries to the
skills, opportunities & understanding of the Internet while keeping
working computers out of landfills. Our chapter volunteers have
gathered, tested & shipped over 27,500 computers that connect 2,600
schools, libraries, universities, orphanages & youth centres used by
over a million youth per year.Http://www.worldcomputerexchange.org

Our intention is that these groups will connect to the Internet and
provide youth with educational opportunities. In some cases these
connections take time to complete or when completed are not robust
enough to provide a lab with easy access to information. 

For that reason we've begun to explore ways of adding content into
Edubuntu install on our shipped computers.  This content certainly means
inclusion of Edubuntu software, but we've also recently begun to extract
web content(with permission) for inclusion.  We may gradually move to
setting up proxy servers in the schools we equip, but often our partners
lack the skill to maintain them.

I see three challenges that we are facing:

How do you provide content to no/low bandwidth schools?
Specifically how can we best provide public health content on our
donated computers?
How can we provide classroom/school management software to our partners?

Best regards
Jack ODonnell
Chicago Coordinator
Regional Manager for Latin America
773 316 2944





On Tue, 2010-08-31 at 15:19 -0500, Belinda Lopez wrote:
> Greetings all!
>    I'm working on a short-term assignment to review and update 
> Canonical's Ubuntu in Education resources.  This includes making the 
> various websites easier to use for end user like students, parents, 
> educators as well as solution providers and others who want to do 
> business in the Education market place using Ubuntu and its 
> derivatives.  The Education sector is an important space on many levels 
> to both Canonical and Ubuntu.  I can't make any promises other than it 
> being a personal goal of mine to help drive the adoption of Ubuntu in 
> Education at every level so for starters I'm opening up the dialog with 
> the community on best to use the limited resources Canonical currently 
> has to develop some new content for the following audiences:
> 
> End users: students, parents, educators
> School level adoptions: decision makers
> District/regional deployments; policy makers
> Solution Providers: those delivering services and hardware to the 
> Education sector.
> 
> If you have any thoughts on what each audience needs to know please 
> voice your thoughts here or email me privately.  I've also added this 
> item to the Edubuntu meeting agenda to help further the conversation.
> 
> Also, does anyone have idea of how many schools might be using 
> Ubuntu/Edubuntu? or if there is some place we can ask people to let us 
> know about their schools?
> 
> thanks,
> 
> Belinda/dinda
> 
> Education
> Canonical
> belinda.lopez at canonical.com
> dinda at ubuntu.com
> IRC: dinda
> Office: Galveston, Texas
> -- 
> Ubuntu - Linux for Human Beings
> http://www.ubuntu.com
> http://www.edubuntu.org	
> http://www.canonical.com
> ---------------------------
> 
>