Free Software in Education News – October

• We gained a new member from the Netherlands
• I attended an OER barcamp in Cologne
• Erik brought up the idea to create a map of FS municipalities which sparked my hopes to get something similar for edu institutions some day. (I opened a ticket for this to keep it in mind.
• among other inquiries, we had one person asking for “scientific proof” (or anything going in that direction) that teaching with FS will not result in any disadvantages for the pupils when looking for jobs later. The answer we were able to provide wasn’t very satisfying to me. If you are aware of any studies that cover this subject, please contact us!

• continued discussion on Communicating the benefits of Free Software with children
• Nearly all of Romania’s universities use Moodle
• Rasperrypi issues now a monthly newsleter on education
• Yet another interesting article from the Penn Manor School District

• Interview with Alja Isakovic, one of the Young Advisors and organizers for the Europe Code Week program
• codeweek.eu took place with more than 3000 events. There was also a blogpost by Nellie Kroes about codeweek.eu
• In a Joinup post about the use of FS in the Swedish municipality of Alingsås, it is also mentioned that early next year, Alingsås will clone its Intranet and make it available to the municipality’s school students, to use as an online collaboration platform.

• article from April, but haven’t covered it yet: Community College uses Student Success Plan, a set of academic planning and advising tools designed to improve retention, academic performance, persistence, graduation rates and time to degree. Using the My Academic Plan (MAP) tool, advisers can build a course schedule with their students to help them stay on path toward program completion or a degree.
• TuxMathScrabble, the code is now GPL-v3
• iStoa 14.10 for GNU/Linux released. It is a Pharo desktop application. iStoa is a corpus of math interactive exercises for grade 1. It comes with about 25 set of exercises, presented in categories. The project is in active development, new sets of exercises are regularly added. The author will be happy for any feedback, suggestions and contributions.
• New release: eXeLearning 2.0.1
• “Meet Poppy” – 3D-printed robot set to inspire innovation in classrooms

• The Debian Edu Team announceed the release of Debian Edu Jessie 8.0+edu0~alpha0

This paper (in German) suggests not just to teach how to code, rather to replace the subject “programming” with “digital exploration”. That subject shall deal with social, political and economical aspects of digitial developments.