I have been studying SAGE for the past few weeks in preparation for creating a SAGE tutorial for 12-18 year olds. A topic I would like to discuss is the best way to make SAGE available in the typical high school classroom. I have found that the computer systems in most high schools in my area are very tightly controlled by the IT personnel that are responsible for these systems. The IT staff are also often located in an off-site facility that services multiple schools and it is very difficult to get them to install special software in a given computer lab. My guess is that this kind of problem is common.
I will provide two examples of the kinds of difficulties that I have run into. The first difficulty was related to a request to have VMware installed on the computers in a high school lab so that I could teach the students how to install Linux on a VMware virtual machine. The IT personnel that were in charge of this lab would would not permit this because the machines were frozen with Deepfreeze and they did not want to change the machine's configuration. We ended up switching to plan B which was to install Linux on some older PCs that the school just happened to have. The second difficulty was related to a second school's firewall policies. The students were only able to access certain sites on the Internet and it was difficult to get the IT personnel to change the firewall policies in a timely manner, if at all. As a side note, access to services like yahoo groups and google groups was not permitted at all. This means that if these students needed support from the SAGE support list, they would be unable to access the google group. I have thinking about this problem and so far I have come up with the following two possible solutions: Solution 1) Create a SAGE livecd that would contain SAGE, Firefox and misc. applications that would be useful to have. If this solution was pursued, I think I would be able to create a SAGE livecd which is similar to this other livecd that I have already created: http://download.java.net/general/jdos/releases/jdos_2006.alpha2.iso Solution 2) Of course, the second solution is to simply set up a SAGE server in the computer lab or somewhere on the Internet if the firewall policies would allow for this. The problem I am encountering with this solution, however, is that with the current SAGE notebook paradigm, students are able to see the contents each other's worksheets which will be a problem when using SAGE for homework and tests. It would be nice if SAGE had something like a bookcase that could contain multiple notebooks. The way I see a bookcase possibly working is that a user would log into a bookcase and zero or more notebooks would be displayed. The user could either create a new notebook and give it a password so that other user's could not access it, or they could open an existing notebook if they had the password for it. The bookcase's administrator would have a separate 'root' password so that all the notebooks in the bookcase could be accessed for purposes such as grading. Anyway, does anyone have any thoughts on this issue? Thanks :-) Ted --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URLs: http://sage.math.washington.edu/sage/ and http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
