On Wednesday 04 June 2003 19:06, Beni Cherniavsky wrote: > So, since there *is* a motivation among hackers to provide schools > with free software that would benefit them, why won't the schools tell > us what they want? I'm thinking along the lines of some site where > schools/teachers can post "wanted" requests describing what they want.
I don't know what special educational software schools need or want, as none of the schools I've been to used any (except for half a year of logo in elementary school, which I don't really remember anymore). As far as generic (ie non-educational) software goes, though, the biggest problem (for me) is with all the schools using MS Office. In my highschool, I've had a compulsory year of 'learning' to use msoffice (highlighting powerpoint), a year when one out of four literature classes were spent using msword instead of a notebook, the computers 5-unit bagrut included a unit of excel (now replaced by access), and the biology 3-unit bagrut included a unit of msword+excel. And 90% of the time and effort went to teaching students how to go around the braindamaged msoffice design, without even using it efficiently (exactly the case of manually applying font sizes instead of using styles). Unlike most educational software (in my experience), using msoffice at school requires you to use it at home as well - for homework as well as for year-long assignments (we had half a year to create a big powerpoint presentation). And I'm tired of teachers who first demand that you have and use a copy of msword, and then either offer to give you a copy or tell you you're a fool if you aren't willing to use illegal copies. Now that openoffice works better with msoffice formats, this problem is partly alleviated, but awarenes of openoffice among students & teachres still needs to be hightened a lot. Teachers ought to suggest to students to use the freely available openoffice, instead of offering them copies of msoffice. (Once OO.o 1.1 goes stable, anyway). Since it also runs on windows, it can be looked at separately from the larger issue of using entirely free software. The problem is threefold: - They are spending tax money on buying copies of msoffice. - They are forcing, or at least encouraging, students to illegally copy msoffice to use at home. Of course, now that ooffice exports to msoffice formats, this problem is lessened, but it'd be much better if the schools could help highten awareness of ooffice and other free software. - They are teaching (badly, but that's outside our scope) to use software that (I hope) won't be used nearly as much much in the not too distant future (ie by the time people now in 7th grade graduate). Thus counteracting the government's pro-openoffice policy. So a policy change from the MoE wrt msoffice would be most welcome. I remember that _something_ seemed to be brewing on that front from the speeches at go-linux... Schools, just like universities, could become (with government support) the perfect venue for promotion of free software. Starting with things like openoffice (as a mostly drop-in replacement of msoffice that runs on windows) and gradually moving towards entire free systems. Another point is the compilers used in pascal and c classes. I don't know what's used for c, but I've had enough of turbo pascal (which the teacher requires you to get a copy of, too[1]). If they switch to e.g. gpc, they can use a better IDE too, like gideon. Although in my school, they make you write on paper 95% of the time, so that's not as important... I hope this is legible enough - I've strong feelings on this subject (just now finishing 12 years of school with ms software) which prevented me from writing a better organized post... [1] Of course, you can use any decent compiler without her noticing, but again, do we want teachers telling students to get illegal copies of tp? -- Dan Armak Matan, Israel Public GPG key: http://cvs.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key
pgp00000.pgp
Description: signature
