[gcompris-devel] helping teachers with open source softwares

[Bruno Coudoin]

Le lundi 02 février 2009 à 10:40 +0200, Jorge Mariano a écrit :
> Hi Bruno,Miguel and all the other programmers of Gcompris
> 
> Today I write to you about a growing interest in the teaching community.
> 
> More and more the schools, kindergardens are using open source software 
> and they find themselves wanting to use what they teach to be included 
> in the software that the community creates.
> 
> ex: Gcompris activities, tuxpaint, tuxmath, etc ...  

You forgot the outstanding KDE-EDU.

I am not always very optimistic. I also believe we can fill most of the
needs. I am glad to see people out there deploying and installing our
soft in more and more schools.

> So a few months ago I asked that a module be build in Gcompris, so that 
> the teachers be able to change the words/letters in their exercises 
> inside the activities of Gcompris.

Yes, Miguel worked on it and it's commited in trunk. We need to work on
the save location to make it functional.

> Well it seems that other open source software are receiving the same 
> requests and it would be great if all the open source community that are 
> creating software for this type of clients be able to synchronize their 
> activities and work together.

Well, it is not obvious but in our little circle of educational free
software, we all know each others. Even if we don't work on the same
projet, there is no problem, even when one projet overlap another one.

My personal belief is that we don't have many offers and in my case if
people prefers Schoolsplay I am still happy that they choose a free
software.

> here is a link to a message of another open source software ( TUXMATH)  
> asking for participation of another open source software ( Tuxpaint) to 
> synchronize their work in this matter.
> 
> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=200902011543.00580.holy%40wustl.edu&forum_name=tuxpaint-devel
> 
> What do you say, should the programmers of Gcompris work together with 
> them in this COMMON cause ?

We also went there. There is already an administration system within
GCompris. Yes, we maybe interested in having something similar to what
is proposed by Tim for TuxMath. There are also the KDE-EDU team that
already implemented a 'get hot new stuff' feature to grab exercises from
the web.

What we did in GCompris is very easy to setup. There is no server to
administer is there is no need for. We have to consider that most
schools don't have a sysadmin out there to help to setup and maintain a
too complex solution.

I don't know, users out there, do you need the feature mentioned in the
link above, would you use it and for doing what ?

-- 
Bruno Coudoin
http://gcompris.net  Free educational software for kids
http://toulibre.org  Logiciel Libre à Toulouse
http://april.org     Promouvoir et défendre le Logiciel Libre