Sep
11
Michael Kölling on Greenfoot
September 11, 2009 | | Leave a Comment
Originally published at http://opensourceschools.org.uk/michael-k-lling-greenfoot.html
It’s great to see Open Source Schools community member Michael Kölling’s new book, an Introduction to Programming with Greenfoot published.
Greenfoot is one of the new wave of graphical programming environments written with learners in mind. Like Scratch, Alice and E-Toys, it’s open source software, and as with these other examples, it’s a toolkit which lets learners start writing code for themselves, taking control of the computer and learning through problem solving and experiment, providing a powerful way of looking at the world. However, where Scratch, Alice and E-Toys all nod in the direction of the historically significant (and still used) Logo programming language, Greenfoot supports Java, with its users learning standard object-oriented programming in Java, admittedly within a development environment that makes working with interaction and graphics very easy. As Michael puts it in his introduction, “While Greenfoot is an educational environment, Java is not a toy language”. Read more
May
1
Schooltool 1.0 released
May 1, 2009 | | Leave a Comment
From http://opensourceschools.org.uk/schooltool-v10-released.html
Those who’ve been following the recent Open Source Schools discussion thread on open source MIS systems will be pleased to learn of the release of SchoolTool v1.0 after what developer Tom Hoffman describes as a long and winding road, stretching back to 2000.
SchoolTool, whose development has been supported by the Shuttleworth Foundation, is a web-based, open source, student information system and calendar server designed for primary and secondary schools worldwide. The goal of the project is for a simple, turnkey system. Today’s version 1 release supports demographics, gradebook, attendance, calendaring (inlcuding timetables and resource booking) and reporting. With a well documented API and modular architecture, it should be possible for other developers to customize SchoolTool to local requirements and add in extra functionality, as well as supporting integration with other web-based tools. There are more details of the feature list at http://book.schooltool.org/htmlhelp/features.html
SchoolTool is released under the GPL v2, and is buit in Python on Zope 3, with internationalisation already in place via Launchpad’s Rosetta service. It’s a three step install on Ubuntu Linux.
Tom and his team are commited to continued, brisk development prior to a number of scheduled deployments for the next academic year, and are keen that “schools, service providers, government agencies, vendors, hackers and other interested parties” have the chance to test, use, deploy and offer feedback on SchoolTool over the next few months.
There’s already been some discussion on the SchoolForge UK MIAS list.
Apr
25
Sugar on a stick
April 25, 2009 | | Leave a Comment
Sugar, the operating system and GUI for OLPC’s truly innovative XO-1 laptops is now available, in beta at least, as a bootable USB stick, allowing any netbook, laptop or desktop to run this amazing re-interpretation of educational computing.
Sugar is built on the idea of activities rather than programs, with an interface designed to be ‘discoverable’, ie one which children can learn through play and experimentation. Sugar also affords a social experience of computing, as activities are sharable with other students using the same mesh server, thus allowing collaborative text editing, browsing, graphics and indeed programming. Read more
Apr
12
Ofsted and Open Source
April 12, 2009 | | 1 Comment
Written for Open Source Schools
Ofsted’s report on The Importance of ICT was published over a month ago, and was met with perhaps a degree of surprise at some of its criticisms about aspects of ICT provision in schools, most notably for higher attaining and older pupils. There’s much in the report to strengthen the case for greater use, and indeed development, of open source software in schools. Read more
Apr
10
Why schools should use open source software
April 10, 2009 | | 4 Comments
Originally published on BBC Open Lab.
Awareness of open source software amongst teachers, technical staff and students is certainly far greater now than even a few years ago, thanks to projects like Moodle, Firefox and Audacity leading their respective fields. For schools, the appeal of open source is that it’s free. But ‘free’ is about freedom at least as much as it’s about price: Liberté rather than gratuite as the French would have it. The free software movement have identified the four freedoms underpinning open source software, and these offer compelling reasons for educators to look seriously at this software. Read more
Mar
10
BBC Learning – Open Lab
March 10, 2009 | | Leave a Comment
BBC Learning’s Open Lab, a brilliant new website for the open source development of educational resources, is now live. Not unlike the Open Source Schools site, Open Lab is about fostering a community around the notion of sharing: content, knowledge and experience. By developing resources as open source, teachers and developers will be able to build on the great work started through Open Lab, and the BBC are keen that everyone has a chance to contribute, so are looking for ideas and feedback as well as development projects. As a way of getting teachers, students and developers working together on a creating tools and resources, the BBC has here a project with huge potential for not only developing great code, but also for transforming the way educational software gets written. Read more
Feb
26
A level playing field for open source software
February 26, 2009 | | 1 Comment
The government’s support for open source software, as outlined yesterday at http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/media/123372/090224opensource.pdf, is to be welcomed. Given that most UK education takes place in the public sector, it is to be hoped that this support from central government will be reflected in greater confidence at school and local authority level to adopt, specify and develop open source solutions, making possible the re-use and sharing of software, and perhaps ultimately content, amongst schools and LAs. Read more
Feb
11
Laconi.ca
February 11, 2009 | | Leave a Comment
Given the increasing interest in Twitter amongst educators, and indeed the general population, it’s hardly surprising that a number of teachers are starting to explore ways of using this in class, with ideas including collaborative storytelling, gathering feedback, home-school links, e-penpals and word games (see, eg Tom Barrett’s colaborative presentation). The sort of personal learning network which we see people developing through Twitter in their professional lives is certainly something which many students would undoubtedbly benefit from, although, as with much social networking technology, there are challenges here for purposing micro-blogging towards educational rather than social ends, as well as the obvious e-safety issues associated with children’s participation in the open web.
Laconi.ca is an open source, web-server based implementation of a micro-blogging platform. It offers one possibility for experimenting with, and, I’d hope, making the most of the opportunities which microblogging opens up, in way which it is relatively easy for schools or local authorites to monitor and control. By using open standards, such as RSS and XMPP, Laconi.ca allows a degree of integration with other open source platforms like Moodle, Elgg, Drupal and Jabber ‘out of the box’, and through its support of Twitter’s API also allows users to access it through a large number of supported Twitter clients. Hosting it on a school’s webserver would further facilitate single sign on with Moodle et al, well with a little technical php/sql work for the time being.
You can try laconi.ca out from a user’s perspective at http://identi.ca/ , or download the latest version to install on a webserver of your own from http://laconi.ca/trac/wiki/Laconica_0.7.1
Feb
3
Moodle and Open Source Security
February 3, 2009 | | Leave a Comment
There was a story in Friday’s TES about a number of schools’ Moodle installations being compromised, resulting in some fairly graphic pornography ending up on these school’s learning platforms. Whilst I’m not sure of the exact details of this particular exploit, this could so easily have been avoided, in this case by just keeping the software up to date.
The security of open source applications is a complex but interesting area. Security is an issue which open source projects have to take seriously, for the sake of the project’s and the developers’ reputation if nothing else. Eric S Raymond’s seminal ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar‘, includes Linus’s Law: that ‘given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow’, and thus, by exposing the source code to the scrutiny of large, technically literate user and developer communities, the chance of any security loop-hole being spotted is far greater than if access to the source code is limited to just the developer team itself. In the crucial area of cryptography, it’s been held since the 19th century that, in essence, the only secure algorithms are open algorithms (Kerchoff’s Principle) – it’s easy enough to write an encryption routine that you yourself couldn’t break (I remember doing this myself at the age of 13), far harder to write one which will pass the scrutiny of a world-wide community of crypto experts. Read more
Jan
27
Informal learning Wordles
January 27, 2009 | | 6 Comments
My first experiments with the Wordle site were with children’s reports: these were great, would make brilliant report covers, but alas pupil confidentiality prevents me posting them here!
The survey Terry Freedman and I conducted last month of children’s use of technology outside school produced some great, if non representative, quantitative data, but also a fair number of qualitative responses which a former mathematician such as myself struggles to analyse. Wordle to the rescue! Here are the clouds generated from the five main write-in questions. I think they make very interesting reading. Do note the significance of games in all these!
Give examples of things you have learnt using technology that are not related to school work.
