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Teaching Computer Lit. in Developing Countries?
Pro777 asks: "I am a US Peace Corps volunteer currently teaching 'Computer Studies' at a High School in the Republic of Samoa, in the South Pacific. Anyways, myself and other IT teachers are having a difficult time finding a good digital textbook to teach basic skills such as basic computer architecture, word processing, and using spreadsheets. Real textbooks are cost prohibitive, and a lot of what is found is too high level for our students. Any suggestions?"
MIT is putting all of its course materials online.
There should be plenty of stuff in there to cull for your introductory courses.
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
Wikipedia, Wikibooks, plus various wikis and websites all over the web for more detailed texts, like TLDP, Internet FAQ Archives etc. Good luck!
How to think like a computer scientist
Dive into Python
And have you considered illegitimately downloading texts off of filesharing networks? I don't anyone will really care...
They are a free on line book supplier. I did a quick scan of their offerings and did not find very much but their list keeps growing and you might have better luck. http://www.promo.net/pg/
I think this is the perfect (and intended) use for Wikibooks.
One book that might be useful: Windows XP for Beginners.
There are a lot of web sites that have sections for teaching beginners how to do many of the basics that you speak of. If you're using Microsoft software, be sure to check out the Office section of their web site -- there are a wealth of materials there. Assuming you have a small enough class, collecting articles based on the course outline and putting them into a series of PDFs that can be easily shared and printed amongst your students should provide the beginners level material.
AFAIK, there isn't anything free in the formal courseware world for the kind of content you are looking for. The market for beginners books, guides, and lessons is staggering -- you'll be pressed to find a good quality beginners coursebook that doesn't cost a pretty penny. The short web articles on the other hand are plentiful and should hopefully be enough to get you and your students going.
Best of luck.
Originally funded by the local Goodwill in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, GCF offers instructor-led online classes, as well as free training materials, for all sorts of classes, from "Computer Basics" to "Access 2002." The best part is that they also offer free materials for OpenOffice.org software!
The UN-funded International Open Source Network has an excellent "Intro to Linux Desktop" course at http://www.iosn.net/training/end-user-manual/. That page also has links to other free software training materials.
You should totally write up a detailed account of what you're doing and submit it as a Slashdot story -- I'd be interested to hear more. Or do you have a (shudder) blog?
Good luck!
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http://www.linux-tutorial.info/modules.php?name
http://www.internet4classrooms.com/on-line2.htm
http://www.w3schools.com/html/
http://homeschooling.gomilpitas.com/explore/pro
http://documentation.openoffice.org/manuals/
http://oooauthors.org/groups/authors/userguide2
http://spreadsheets.about.com/
Also check out both gnome and kde documentation for running their various applications, should be enough there to get most any kids going. I would imagine that knoppix is your friend too, easy enough to burn all the spare copies you might need, no worries (not much) about borked installations to the schools hard drives. That's kde side, gnome side ubuntu will ship you free disks as well. Free and free is a dandy price. And dozens of other distros for free if you can download them on some broadband. Dialup you are sorta semi limited to the minis which don't have as many options, although fine in their own right.
Windows stuff, really no idea, on your own basically, although I imagine there are any number of tutorials for anything you might want at any level out there.
HTH