From: John Bolger (jbolger at domain socc.ie)
Date: Fri 04 Feb 2000 - 22:01:48 GMT
On Fri, Feb 04, 2000 at 08:51:07PM +0000, John Gay wrote:
>
>
> John:
>
> Has St Ollie's got Learning Logic, or some other classroom-learning
> oriented software? I know about the different office, network and programming
> type stuff. I am interested in School specific type apps. It is difficult to
> convince a school to change from MS office to Linux office when there is little
> obvious benefit. But if we could show them stuff like Learning Logic, specific
> school oriented stuff, it would give us a much better argument.
WE do not yet have it installed, but I will be taking a look at it over
the next few days. At present we are only using Linux on the server - we
still havent gone as far as using it on the desktop. We are looking into
it though.
>
> We also can't forget apps to make the teachers lives easier. If someone with
> teaching experience could help lay-out specific apps for teachers: things for
> tracking grades, performance, what-ever else it is teachers do, this could also
> be implemented into a school-based system. Head-Masters are not likely to be
> impressed with, 'I can give your students Web and E-Mail access.' But they would
> be very impressed with, 'This will teach your students to read, write, algebra
> AND give your teachers powerful tools for tracking student performance!'
I just succedded in moving the data for Facility CMIS (the student records
system in use in most of Ireland) from the MS Access MSD files to a
Postgresql database, using the ODBC driver. The facility program is used
by almost everyone and does most of the admin work for many schools.
This means the data for students is on the Linux box, and can be accessed
by perl/python scripts, php, C and any other programming language, and
is a first step to a linux based solution - the data is now accessable.
IT should be difficult to write some tools to allow tracking of
performance.
>
> These are the areas we should concentrate on developing and pushing for our
> schools. These are the type of app's that the people with the money want to see
> in the schools. And if they can have them without having to spend loads for the
> OS and latest hardware as well, they will certainly listen,
As the curriculium for other courses is available it should also be
possible to make information about them available for free. There is a lot
of info out ther, but unfortunately its not in the one place. If it could
be put in the one place and given a standard format it could be delivered
though any web browser. THis would essientially be a replacement to text
books and would be a big project. However it would be very useful for
disadvantaged areas where some people cant afford textbooks.
>
> Cheers,
>
> John Gay
>
>
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