Here’s what we collected in February. If you come accross anything that might be worth mentioning in this series, please drop me a note, dump it in this pad or even better: drop it on the edu-eu mailinglist!
FSFE Edu-Team activities
We are making quite some progress in the NLEdu campaign: Kevin reports that the commercial director of SchoolMaster, the largest Dutch ELO/student administration software supplier, confirmed that they will roll out a platform-independent HTML5 version in April. This would make the NLEdu campaign a success as it will allow Free Software users to access the course materials with any standard compliant browser.
In a response to an interview Kevin gave to an education-related news site, an employee of Three Ships, the second-largest ELO / student administration software supplier also promised to roll out an update “mid-2014” that would “further improve interoperability”, although they weren’t very clear about the meaning of this claim. While I was writing this report, Kevin publihsed further info about this matter.
Community
- As an update of previous mentions: The Laptops at Penn Manor have Landed! Congratulations! 🙂
- Pete Herzog writes about “How to teach hacking in school and open up education“
- Greek kindergarten switched to Ubuntu Linux
- KDE Edu module maintainer Anne-Marie Mahfouf resigned as KDE Edu module maintainer (at least until September). She’ll be greatly missed. Aleix Pol will take over.
Government
- Ministry of Education of Romania agrees and recommends Edubuntu. As Matthias already pointed out, there are way better reasons to switch to Free Software than just to avoid license problems.
Edu Software
- Loris pointed us to http://learndoubleentry.org, a website for students learning accounting and bookkeeping. It’s based on DELT, that is free software (GPL Affero) and can be installed separetely, if one prefers to have his/her own setup.
- On the KDE-Edu list, Filipe reported that GCompris is migrating from GTK to Qt (QtQuick). The main reason is to create a tablet version of GCompris.
Distro News
SUGAR
- Article about Chandi Devi Primary School, Nepal
- another nice report about a training event on a “balcony”: “The Wise Man in the Training” or this post about the Coffee table books by OLPC San Francisco
More SUGAR news at
- Walter Bender and his sugar digest and here and here.
- More news by Somosazucar
Edubuntu
Other News
- Anonomous submission via ehterpad: Free Software technologies in the “Alternative Education Map“: It is an implementation of Ushahidi.
Future Events
- Mach 10-15, 2014: Open Education Week is a series of events to increase awareness of open education movement.
- March 16 and 19, 2014: /ch/open educational conference in (Switzerland)
- March 29: Zurich: Rosmarie Quadranti will open the event “Digital sustainability? Also in schools!” (in German) One of the other speakers will be founder and former president of the FSFE, Georg Greve.
- April 3-5, 2014: Robocup German Open (Germany)
- April 11.-13. EduCamp Frankfurt (M), Germany
- April 12-13: Sugar Camp #3 in Carrefour Numérique – Cité des Sciences, Paris. Hosted by Bastien Guerry (via Walter Bender)
- August 9-15: KDE edu Randa meeting (please register!)