Foss And Education, a presentation delivered on Software freedom Day 2011

Foss And Education, a presentation delivered on Software freedom Day 2011
PUP Quezon City

Foss and Education

Google for Education

Using Google as an educational tool.

Students, teachers and staff can share ideas more quickly and get things done more effectively when they have access to the same powerful communication and sharing tools. Google Applications provides email, sharable online calendars, instant messaging tools and even a dedicated websites to faculty, students and staff for free. There's no hardware or software to install or maintain, since everything is delivered through a standard web browser -- anytime, from anyplace.

We have tested this with our students in AABC, as part of the classes conducted by the faculty is online, they are allowed to use the tools of their choice, skype, yahoo messenger or Google.  And with the google package, we were able to maximize learning and introduce our students

You can mix and match from the following services for your entire school :

Gmail - Offer email to your faculty, students and staff with 2 gigabytes of storage per account, search tools to help them find information fast, and instant messaging built right into the browser (chat can easily be disabled for the whole school if you don't want students to be able to IM with their accounts). One good thing nowadays is that Gmail has both video and talk capabilities.

Google Talk - Teachers and students can call or send instant messages to their contacts for free -- anytime, anywhere in the world. Imagine the possibilities for people collaborating on projects from different locations.

Google Calendar - Everyone can organize their schedules and share events, meetings and entire calendars with others. You can even publish the school calendar on your website to let families know about events like back-to-school nights, homecoming and vacation days.

Google Docs - Students and teachers can create documents, spreadsheets and presentations and then collaborate with each other in real-time right inside a web browser window.

Google Sites - Create a class site and edit it the same way you'd edit a document -- no technical expertise required. Your site can bring together all the information you want to share with your colleagues and students, including docs, calendars, photos, videos and attachments.

Blogger-Teaching the use of blogs to enhance their communication skills also is another way of allowing them to express themselves.


With schools who are looking into new productivity tools to enhance classroom learning and participation, using google as a part of your tools in enhancing classroom instruction can be both a transformative and learning experience.

Textbooks in E-books?

Is there a current need for textbooks in schools?

Normally the trend would be in school is to require courses taken to have textbooks, and each teacher would always have his perrenial bias towards recommending his won favourite textbook, be it authored by him or his favourite college pprofessor. .In buying technology textbooks as time passes by specially in IT they tend to be outdated by the time you receive them and because we have this great thing called the Internet filled with technology information.

Not so long ago, it took a fair amount of work, though to assemble a whole semester’s or year’s worth of coursework from web materials. Obviously, supplemental materials abounded, but textbooks certainly do help with a curriculum and keeping students on track from day to day. And as a school administrator for a school with students from class CD and e groups, I would always look for affordable alternatives, knowing that the web is full of them, it only would take you a specially dedicated researcher to find these things on the net. We were all set for introductory web classes and office productivity, but more advanced web goodies and programming were certainly not in our book closet.

It didn’t take much of our time to do Googling, that we came over to see that there are full textbooks and curricula were now available for free to cover every topic I had in mind. The idea of Open Textbooks is a fairly new one, following in the same vein as Open Source Software. Some of them, like Wikibooks, are works in progress. Others are robust teaching tools, like those found on opentextbook.org:

• Introduction to Programming Using Java

• How to Think Like a Computer Scientist (this comes in 4 different versions, each specific to an implementation language)

The Canadian site Free Learning is also a treasure trove of information and is searchable as well. This is more of a meta-database, pointing to a variety of open text resources.

This doesn’t even take into account initiatives like MIT’s OpenCourseWare. Two introductory computer science courses (including notes, presentations, source code, and other supplemental materials) are available here, along with countless courses appropriate for high school and independent study. Courses particularly appropriate for high school are even broken out on this site

We’re certainly nowhere near a time when we can dispense with purchased, traditional textbooks, especially in core subjects that often need to be aligned with local, state, or federal standards. However, I have no doubt that I can give teachers everything they need to teach a wide variety of courses in technology without spending a dime.

We just have to be wise enough and have the temerity to search within the available set of freee resources in our reach.

An IT Program on Philippine Free TV

Looking at Convergence

Ive recently seen a very interesting program in Information technology. The name of the Show is Convergence at NET-25. I liked the format of the show. Except that it does not cover FOSS/Open Souce/LINUX material. One can view its programs every evening at 8 pm at channel 25 on your free TV but you can also watch it online at www.net-25.com/convergence. They have live video streaming.

Ive seen that indeed they cover much topics like new trends in Information Technology, they even cover topics such as WEB 2.0, social networking, Updates in software and hardware development, Gaming and electronic gadgets as well as multimedia solutions.

Convergence as a whole answers to a lot of things that normally a person needs with IT....in short a must for every person who uses information technology.

Il be watching their shows and be commenting on their content once in a while.

Will inlcusion of WINE make the Ubuntu flavour better?

One of the keepers of the Ubuntu software respositories (called MOTUs, or Masters of the Universe) has proposed a mainstream inclusion of Wine with Ubuntu. For any of you unfamiliar with Wine, it is a body of software that allows Linux users to run a variety of Windows applications. WineHQ summarizes:

Wine is a translation layer (a program loader) capable of running Windows applications on Linux and other POSIX compatible operating systems. Windows programs running in Wine act as native programs would, running without the performance or memory usage penalties of an emulator, with a similar look and feel to other applications on your desktop.

Wine allows applications ranging from Accelerated Reader to Examview to Logger Pro to run on a Linux box. A complete list of Windows educational applications enabled with Wine is available here.

Obviously, making Wine easily-accessible to Linux users would bring down a significant barrier to its adoption.

According to Neowin.net,

This does not mean the Wine would be installed by default but instead that, on clicking an executable file, the user would be prompted if they want to install Wine. An automatic install would follow, similar to what is already done for codecs in Ubuntu.

The proposed inclusion of Wine certainly makes sense for Ubuntu, largely considered the mainstream Windows alternative of choice (next to OS X). It also means that users of netbooks won’t necessarily have to run Windows XP Home to access educational applications. Instead, as Wine continues to mature and see increased adoption and integration with Ubuntu, Linux netbooks become far more realistic. So, in fact, do DIY labs, saving licensing fees on operating systems, even if the fees can’t be saved on some proprietary software used in your school system.

What Does It take to switch to desktop Linux in Schools?

As a school Administrator, I always try to find ways to economize in a lot of things but not sacrificing quality, I came across my favourite Zdnet Blogger Christopher Dawson on “Just what does it take to switch to desktop Linux “ and I saw that indeed the article was worth reading and commenting. According to dawson the following are the parameters needed to be considered when considering on wWhat is required to switch teachers to Linux on his desktop?

Here’s Christopher Dawson's initial list.

• Know how to access Windows shares on the network

• Have a rudimentary understanding of the file system to ensure that he could copy, paste, and otherwise move around his files, including how to make backups

• Understand how to save documents in PDF, ODF, and Office formats

• Understand the differences in interface between OpenOffice and Office 2003 (the current system used in the superintendent’s office)

These are all free. In addition to these, Dawson also includes the following issues for users:

1. Where are their files kept ?

2. How does one access the budgeting software?

3. How does one access the student information system (web-based)?

4. How do one communicate (email and chat systems are currently web-based)?

Here are some additional important considerations. None of these seem to be deal breakers, but they certainly need to be part of a well-planned and successful conversion if schools at elementary and high school grades are to decide to head down that road:

• Printing: Does all of the printers users access have Linux drivers? Although there is a trend of keeping files digitized and lessening the usage of paper to help the environment, the superintendents,administrator's and registrar’s office, perhaps more than any other administrative unit, must produce printed documents.

• Backup: With Windows machines, one can redirect desktops and user folders to a regularly backed-up server; Vista does a particularly nice (if slow) job of dealing with offline file synchronization. There are plenty of ways to handle this in Linux, but as far as I know, there isn’t anything quite as slick as either group policies in Windows for the redirects or the similar functionality enabled in OS X server .

• Replacing group policy and domain/enterprise levels of control in general: as noted above, while AD may have its share of issues, it makes pushing updates, enforcing policies, etc., really easy. Anyone have a good “Linux administration for dummies” link that covers good ways to handle policy for workstations across a network?

• Remote access: There are plenty of remote access solutions that will work quite well with Linux, but any existing infrastructure needs to be tested for compatibility.

• Complex Excel files: Compatibility between OpenOffice 3 and Microsoft Office is generally quite good. However, since the super’s office also handles budget administration, there are most likely some fairly complicated spreadsheets floating around. A period of testing should certainly go on with OO.org, but a more important consideration may actually be the impact on productivity for budget admins who are extremely proficient in Excel.

• “Extracurricular crap”: (something like what the regular Joe's use to “enhance their productivity by making them relaxed) “Check out any extra curricular software they may have, iTunes, Skype, etc. Yes these are silly but if users are pissed off you took away music they’ll be more likely to resist and sabotage.” another power user comments that : “In my experience it’s not the mainstream applications that prevent a switch but rather the myriad of smaller programs which have no OSS replacements. Be sure to identify and factor these programs into any migration strategy.”

With these things in mind, I'd like to acknowledge the immense help accorded by Sir Chris to us non-techie school managers. Hope that his advice would also work well for you.

His full length article can be accessed at:

http://education.zdnet.com/?p=1976&tag=nl.e539 and

http://education.zdnet.com/?p=1977

G.ho.st personal impressions

I've recently tried G.ho.st, a new virtual PC/Operating system thats web based. You can open it from a browser and youll have lots of features that you will definitely like.

Imagine having your own virtual PC online that you can use and utilize, whose hard disk space increases as you invite others to join you in using G.ho.st.

I recently was visited by Gene Morada, the Philippine representative of G.ho.st and he introduced me to its features, I like the idea of Cloud computing specially when majority of my students com from class CD and E families, imagine what huge amount of storage space my students can have as well as a virtual desktop PC. Im a google fan, dedicated somewhat, but seiing its features, I feel like combining the usage of Google and G.ho.st and see how big my online virtual desktop space can get.

Ive arranged with our IT guy Sir Bryan to have Gene have a seminar on G.ho.st here in school for our students, and i feel like we have a lot of projects and collaboration to do eventually later.

Eventually i hope that G.ho.st would sponsor educational collaborational tools on their desktop so that we can use them to teach programming to our students.

to know more about G.host please click here

For a view of the screen shots of the G.ho.st OS plse click here.

What weve done so far?

Foss in AABC has a long way to go.

From starting in Open Office, mozilla firefox, GIMP, Blender and Foxit, AABC has gone quite some distance in trying to go .

Since we've installed Linux on our classrooms,faculty room and administrative offices Ubuntu (versions 6.10,7.04 and 8.04) and Ubuntustudio (multimedia room). And so far our students are adjusting relatively well.

We were quite lucky that we have open source buffs in our IT department. Sir Dennis Jorolan, our animation guru and Sir Brian de Vivar , our PhPMySQL guru.

Our teachers also have been undergoing in house trainings in open office, Google Docs (for document collaboration among students and faculty , Blogger (for faculty who would post lectures and advnace assignments). Though blogging among teachers still has to be reminded (of which takes time).

Were still trying to master Open base and hopefully well also be able to implement that. weve been actively trying to put FOSSpective into our students.

Among the significant things we think we were able to do outside of our regular students was our short courses among them the introduction of Blender as a 3d animation tool, introducing Open source tools in our COffice Shipboard office productivity course for seafarers and our webdesign courses.


This is just the start of our journey. We hope to do more