Time for edu news again. The draft of the mission statement for the edu team kept me busy the last two months and will continue to do so for a little while. If you have a few minutes at hand, please read it and send us any feed back you might have!
Before we come to the country specific news, I’ll start with all the rest that doesn’t fit in there:
I read an intersting article by Máirín Duffy about how she introduced Inkscape to a middle school. It includes a number of valuable tips that might come in handy for a freedroidz workshop or something similar.
I read a blog post about a nice work shop at a university in Canada to teach students how to participate in Free Software projects. One of the comments led me to a similar project in Granada. Do you know any other activities in this direction in Europe?
The posting also links to another project that aims to help people interested in contributing to Free Software, but don’t know where to start: openhatch.org.
Austria:
Not the latest, but still interesting documents for developers might be the quality criteria for e-learning in Austria. (via Bildungsserver.de in German) Even if teachers would only have to choose among Free Software tools, they face a mass of software. And they can’t try it all before using it. I guess they are likely to pick something recommended by professionals. So, knowing the criteria might help improving free educational software.
France
les logiciels libres : à partager sans compter !
The edu folks from April created a colourful poster to promote Free Software in education and published it under various free (as in freedom) licenses.
Germany
As I read in the tarent blog, a student who participated in one of the freedroidz work shops, wrote a report about it (German).
Greece
GNU/Linux systems for teachers and pupils at elementary schools
Italy
Alessandro Rubini reported on the edu-eu mailing list that “a handful of volunteers worked hard for a few months to deliver a 48-page booklet about why and how to use free software in education. It’s in Italian, as it also collects successful experiences of local schools.”
Spain
The Department of Education in Valencia has created a software package installation for easy download of over 200 educational resources offered by LliureX for Kids version 10.09. (via OSOR). It was first presented at the Fourth Congress of Free Software.
Russia
The collection of news entries about Russia grew remarkably in our wiki. The latest entry (German) is that there’s a new release of the edu version of ALT Linux, a governmental edu distribution.
Outside Europe:
- GNUnify.in in India had a FOSS in Education track
As always: Please help me with your feed-back either in the comments or per email. If you have any news to share that are somewhat related to Free Software in education, you can do so through the
- mailing list edu-eu@gnu.org or
- write a short dent to the OFSET group at identi.ca
- or feed the wiki!