ian
On Sun, 2003-11-30 at 19:36, garry saddington wrote:
We use Open Source almost exclusively to teach ICT and I have the idea that an alternative Open Source National Curriculum would be a good thing, what do others feel?
Good idea. Ideal project for SchoolforgeUK I should think.
I am unsure about what this means. Surely the National Curriculum should not be linked to any particular ICT tool provision. Freedom of choice and all that. It was sensible for the KS3 streategy materials to be produced in MS office format (and pdf BTW) as they are the most common format in use in schools AND Oo etc can read them. As I understand it the materials for special schools will use Macromedia Flash instead of Excel. There are one or two other examples of none MS products that are suggested for use especially for sound/video and database work. Anyway much of the teaching is about K+U, content and process not application skills exactly because of the "What's going to be around in the future" argument. Now if you mean produce materials and sample teaching units that use open source applications then fine. Good idea and I hope the emphasis is on K+U for ICT capability and not on skills in any particular Oo or open source application. If anyone has info on a decent easy to use open source educational programming tool that can be understood by weaker visual learners (eg. similar to Flowol) then let me know where it is. Similiarly we also need an open source gateway/portal product that uses decent encryption for schools to use as their communication and MLE tool. I have looked at Moodle but it has to integrate with the normal authentication methods. One login for everything. I'm obviously not an expert in these things but I need information to help me consider the options. Part of my work is in piloting the Microsoft Learning Gateway for schools (Basically a combination of Sharepoint and Class server). I'd love to have a better, faster open source alternative that integrated well. -- Colin McQueen