[gcompris-devel] helping teachers with open source softwares

[Bruno Coudoin]

Le lundi 02 février 2009 à 16:58 -0600, Tim Holy a écrit :
> Hi Bruno,
> 
> The message that Jorge posted a link to was one that I sent also to 
> GCompris-devel, but for some reason it's being blocked. (I also 
> sent it to KDE-Edu, and it seems to have gotten through there). So I'm sending 
> this directly to you as well as CCing the devel list.
> 
> The proposal I've made isn't very complicated: it's just a directory structure 
> that is particularly useful in situations where schools don't give students 
> their own accounts. This seems to be the case for most schools in the US for 
> kids of age 5-11. At its core it's as much a set of conventions as it is a 
> body of code.
> 
> I don't know whether GCompris needs/wants to store information specific to each 
> kid, but if so, perhaps the conventions for where this is done might be 
> something we'd all be interested in having be common among projects.
> 
> At TuxMath, we already have a command-line application (tuxmathadmin) that can 
> take a "spreadsheet" (in CSV format) and parse it to create the directory 
> structure. We're happy to share that code, of course. But I'm certain there 
> could be work done to make it more flexible and general, as well as to provide 
> a GUI for making it more teacher-friendly.

In GCompris there are only 2 activities that provide a load/save
functionality (word processor and animation/drawing). If the users don't
have a system account, they will all share the same directory. The
easiest way is probably to prefix the files with their names.

Since we also have an internal account system in GCompris, we could use
it to create a directory for each identified user who save a document.

The problem teachers have is to enter the class/user in GCompris, your
spreadsheet maybe useful for that. A better solution would be to have it
saved in a system directory like /etc/schoolusers and each application
could read it to provide the expected functionality relevant to its
usage.

Have you tried to contact the Edubuntu folks ? Creating, replicating and
maintaining the user list should be done at the system level, not by the
applications. By the way, their Schooltool already has the user list,
perhaps its just a way to grab the information from there.
http://www.schooltool.org/


-- 
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