School again

[Chris Robinson]

We don't really know the circumstances of the school, so it's a bit hard to go into specifics.  Broadly speaking though, there's two main categories that school computers fall into: administrative, and teaching.  In most states in Australia the administrative roles of computers are largely dictated by the respective state education departments, so things like departmental networking and email, databases (eg year two net, NAPLAN data et al), accounting,  and now to a larger extent curriculum resources might need to be interfaced to with the department sanctioned OS.  Using another OS might leave the school without technical support or backup since in my experience IT support personnel only receive training in the sanctioned OS, and department IT resources are geared to the mainstream OS.

I don't mean to sound discouraging, just giving the advice that classroom computers are probably your greatest chance of success here.  The good news is, the field is really wide open since the focus is usually on teaching simple tasks.  


For early childhood (yrs 1 and 2) students will normally be shown how to draw a picture, type into a word processor, interact with simple programs and games.

Middle years will normally be expected to extend this to achieve some specific tasks: write a story, draw a picture, achieve a specific goal or task.

Later primary school grades will extend this, but the tasks will be more complex - spreadsheats, photo editing, a basic database etc.  


Many public schools are behind the eight ball when it comes to decent IT teaching in the classroom because the teachers mostly lack the training and understanding themselves.    Computer resources for teaching are generally limited and have to be shared with the whole school.  In many areas of course students have access to computers at home but many in disadvantaged communities are not so lucky.


Anything you give them should be simple to install and teach.  Fortunately the choice with Linux/Ubuntu is extensive and it's possible to find suitable alternatives for almost any requirement.  You wouldn't give them the Gimp for photo editing for example, but one of the simpler alternatives would be suitable.

I suggest you find out what they want to teach, and the solutions should start to suggest themselves immediately.

If the school does not have enough hardware the should approach one of the non-profit recyclers which can be found through searches, for example photobank: http://www.cbq.org.au/

Chris




>________________________________
> From: Mick Skey <skey.mick at gmail.com>
>To: ubuntu-au at lists.ubuntu.com 
>Sent: Thursday, 28 June 2012 4:27 PM
>Subject: School again
> 
>
>Hi guy's
>
>
>I have manage to get a meeting with school Head Mistress
>on Tuesday, I'm going to take Ubuntu 12.04 and the Latest
>Edubuntu, Thank for your help and I'm willing to take more on
>as well. Please feel free to send stuff as this my first time,
>I am not going to push Linux but to show there is something else,
>
>
>As I said before there are schools out there in the same boat as my
>2 rug-rats at and there is a opportunity for us to promote Linux.
>
>
>Please feel free to send suggestion, PLEASE feel free to help
>
>
>Cheers
>-- 
>M.Skey
>
>
>
>
>-- 
>ubuntu-au mailing list
>ubuntu-au at lists.ubuntu.com
>https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-au
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