Slashdot Mirror

"so, is there an area that is missing ? if that is a missing functionality in one of the existing apps, talk to the devs. it might just get implemented. a whole now application might be less likely to appear, but you never know until you rrreally talk about it :)"

Yes. All of the above.

KDE-Edu is included by default on every single distro that I know of (except the embedded ones). They *aren't* educational in the sense of professional educational institutions. They are freeware toys that are ten-a-penny for any operating system in the world and of no practical value whatsoever. Try them with a group of kids... they will get played with for about a minute. Maybe one or two will find/play a favourite a few days in a row. Then they will be forgotten and the kids will have *learned* nothing at all.

Playing hangman is not an educational game. It's a game.
Playing with kstars does not teach you about the cosmos.

For a look at some educational "games" that go down **REALLY** well with schools, have a look at some of the following:

http://www.rm.com/shops/rmshop/Product.aspx?cref=PD2381
RM Maths - Yurk, spit!

I hate the company but this product has kids voluntarily coming into school EVERY DAY FOR SIX MONTHS at 8:20 every morning to do a 15 minute session before school starts. Look at the features... audio and on-screen instructions, staged progression, weakness identification, randomly generated but always valid and skilled questions (aimed at an 80% percent success rate no matter the kid's current level), natural progression based on success, age, time, etc., reviewing of trouble areas per child from an admin interface, vast statistics (not just random ones!), class-based logins (including import and export of pupil data from other programs as CSV files, so you don't have to re-enter DOB's etc. for 450 pupils to get accurate readings) so you can generate a whole class' data in one hit or log them all into a computer suite in one go, network-wide installation, ties in with the English and Welsh national numeracy curriculums with targetted questions for every single tiny point on all of them, locked down interface so the kids can't start a test, wipe out their scores or even exit the program without staff doing it for them. Now look at the price £150 / seat! This is a program that when you first play with the kids interface you think "It's just maths questions". It's not. It's just what the schools want and need. Teachers send kids out of class for 15 minutes to sit and do these questions and the kids would do anything to do it. They love the games, questions, etc., comparing scores, there's even characters and storylines for the younger kids. It's all self-explanatory (although as a maths-and computing-grad, it really could benefit from a overhaul of the explanations of some particular questions) and the kids ALL enjoy sitting and doing it, whether they are doing 2+2, probability, statistics, symmetry, geometry or trying to formulate an algebraic expression. I've never seen kids so enthusiastic for maths in an ordinary state school.

They are dozens of programs to do science experiments on the computer - whether you agree with the practice or not, some schools cannot do the "bloody Health and Safety" stuff to let kids actually do real experiments. You do actual experiments. You mix chemicals, select your measuring devices, take down measurements, make predictions, observe results, get an explanation of all the processes in play from a single program.

Clicker - it's a simple program that does nothing more than have an icon and a speech-synthesized pronunciation of several thousand words in a children-style WYSIWYG word processor. The kids use it. They sell content packs which do things like add "Castles", "Ancient Greece", etc. into the bargain with full multimedia content for each. This thing retails at £100/seat, content packs extra. The difference be

RM, who have had a pretty strong hold on the UK education market since the demise of Acorn, are pushing Eee.

The best thing would probably be thin clients, that actually have almost nothing that can break, but I guess schools are not ready for that as it would require someone capable enough to maintain a central server. (not being impolite here, just realistic).

This is nothing new, until the Windows platform completely wiped out the homegrown competition, we always had educational games in schools in the UK. Companies like Sherston, 4Mation and others released loads of 'games' for schools. Googling about now, I've found a few of the old-skool education games still knocking aroung (for example Granny's Garden), and some others that never seem to have made the jump from the 8 bit days (like Suburban Fox).

Some of the games that were created back in the 90s were very closely tied in with specific National Curiculum targets, and still manages to be quite fun to play - albeit made on quite a small budget, with the sort of money that EA has to throw at production, these new generation of education games could be really good.

Please back this up or admit you pulled it out of your ass.

even 78X cds with no imperfctions ought to be perfectly fine.

The University of Warwick's CS department replaced its last lab of general-use Sun machines with Red Hat machines from RM a year or so ago.

LCD PC
Client Pro All in One
RM All-In-One PC

Seeing these makes it the worst Apple design ever in my opinion.

Basically, in many schools the IT admin staff are mindless glove puppets of RM and can only do what RM say. There's not a lot of point in hiring someone who knows what they're doing when they will charge twice the amount but not be allowed to do any more than reboot or reimage.

Oh yes, and the typical RM contract prohibits any other company's equipment being connected to the network. If that's not abusing your position I don't know what is.

I can only speak for my county (in the top three for IT support in the country according to government figures released recently - we all have an extra day's leave this year as a performance bonus), but it is Windows all the way. I know of only one school in the county that has a Linux server and they are going to swap it for a Windows server because they can't get any support for it - it was installed by a parent of a child who has now left the school).

Using Linux on an admin system is just out of the question - most UK schools run SIMS: 'School Information Management System' and won't even consider buying a system that won't run this software. The curriculum software market is dominated by RM. Their SchoolShare and StoreBox" systems are very popular with primary schools due to the large amount of pre-installed educational software that is strongly tied into the National Curriculum and their Community Connect 3 systems are common in larger schools.

I can't see many schools choosing to go with Linux when Windows is so ubiquitous - it would mean giving up just about all local government IT support other than hardware repairs and going it alone and I just can't see that happening in more than a handful of schools.

I can only speak for my county (in the top three for IT support in the country according to government figures released recently - we all have an extra day's leave this year as a performance bonus), but it is Windows all the way. I know of only one school in the county that has a Linux server and they are going to swap it for a Windows server because they can't get any support for it - it was installed by a parent of a child who has now left the school).

Using Linux on an admin system is just out of the question - most UK schools run SIMS: 'School Information Management System' and won't even consider buying a system that won't run this software. The curriculum software market is dominated by RM. Their SchoolShare and StoreBox" systems are very popular with primary schools due to the large amount of pre-installed educational software that is strongly tied into the National Curriculum and their Community Connect 3 systems are common in larger schools.

I can't see many schools choosing to go with Linux when Windows is so ubiquitous - it would mean giving up just about all local government IT support other than hardware repairs and going it alone and I just can't see that happening in more than a handful of schools.

I can only speak for my county (in the top three for IT support in the country according to government figures released recently - we all have an extra day's leave this year as a performance bonus), but it is Windows all the way. I know of only one school in the county that has a Linux server and they are going to swap it for a Windows server because they can't get any support for it - it was installed by a parent of a child who has now left the school).

Using Linux on an admin system is just out of the question - most UK schools run SIMS: 'School Information Management System' and won't even consider buying a system that won't run this software. The curriculum software market is dominated by RM. Their SchoolShare and StoreBox" systems are very popular with primary schools due to the large amount of pre-installed educational software that is strongly tied into the National Curriculum and their Community Connect 3 systems are common in larger schools.

I can't see many schools choosing to go with Linux when Windows is so ubiquitous - it would mean giving up just about all local government IT support other than hardware repairs and going it alone and I just can't see that happening in more than a handful of schools.