On 6/12/07, Ted Kosan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 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.
My wife is a middle school teacher and the stories she tells me are completely consistent with what you say. I teach at an undergrad school and even there, IT support can be difficult and slow. > > 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. You did not say which sage sites were blocked by a firewall. However, I can confirm that firewalls are a problem even in a university setting. For about a year I wasn't able to access the wiki or notebook at work, but finally they opened them all up. Honestly, I think if you were able to write a SAGE tutorial for middle and high school students then I this would serve as evidence that SAGE sites should not be blocked and that SAGE is useful for fulfilling the mission of the school system. My impression is that school administrators almost speak a different language. > > 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 > This is a great solution and the only drawback is that such a live cd should be maintained. In fact, I believe that a live SAGE CD has already been created by Alfredo Portes http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/alfredo/ Can you look at that and see if it work for you? Thanks very much for your comments and feedback. > > 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/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
