Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-edu (29 mails)

[James Tremblay <jamesat@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

My desire to create the EDU-CD is and has been to build a tool set that
an emerging school or a school in the beginning stages of modernizing
their infrastructure or a school that needs to shed it's licensing costs
could in fact choose to either employ all of the "vertical solution"
from openSUSE\Novell or pick and choose components, If you've read the
http://en.opensuse.org/Education page and the pages linked to from it,
the idea I propose is to include the core tools to build and manage a
school or school district in as easy a form to install and manage as
possible considering the multitude of science\math teachers forced to do
my job. I never say anything about imposing any form of curricula
restriction on that school, the offering is merely meant to eliminate
the raping most school budgets suffer from companies like Pearson
digital (which owns SASI XP , Powerschool and Chancery SMS) who license
software to schools on a per student model that frequently have double
digit costs. In my state those products average 28.00$ US per student
and Microsoft only cuts deals with the savviest of technology directors,
otherwise an MS server is 1000.00 $ US on average and each product still
contains a need for its own CAL, again usually a two digit price tag and
have repetitive "maintenance costs" . THIS IS OFFENSIVE! My school
District saved over 20,000.00$ US by saying no to Pearson and using
Centre\SIS. Having a formidable low cost infrastructure that can produce
the necessary assessment and management tools gives that district a lot
of freedom to pursue and finance a huge array of pedagogical avenues.

My son goes to a "charter school" his school is outside the confines of
my states Department of Education it is also outside its funding stream,
however as a sophomore in high school he already has college credits in
math and mechanical engineering all possible because the school uses OSS
and redirects it's funding towards more modern methods of teaching as
well as holding teachers accountable for there students progress and
paying them appropriately for those achievements. I think giving the
teachers the tools and incentives to succeed is even more important than
creating a pedagogical guideline. Student scores and class achievements
speak for the effectiveness of that teachers\schools skills and style.
Forcing any guidelines on curricula or pedagogy only creates an
atmosphere of a stagnant classroom that meets those goals and nothing
more. The state of Massachusetts has a test it imposes on it's
sophomores and has only produced an atmosphere were it's marginal
students get taught just enough to pass this test and the other groups
of students are forced to waste valuable classroom time reviewing
information covered on this test rather than moving forward. A better
assessment method in my opinion is a classroom level assessment of grade
level expectations (i.e. can a second grader read and comprehend
polysyllabic words or are they still reading "see spot run") 

Back to the point , the EDU-CD and the efforts of the community here are
geared toward providing the tools teachers request in a format that is
easy to install. 
-- 
James Tremblay
Director of Technology
Newmarket School District
Newmarket,NH
http://en.opensuse.org/Education
"let's make a difference"

-- 
To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-edu+unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-edu+help@xxxxxxxxxxxx