MESSAGE
| DATE | 2003-05-20 |
| FROM | Dave Williams
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [hangout] Alt schools demo
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That's some good news.
We all agreed that you can't expect teachers to be as familiar with
available technology as they should be, so it's nice to know that there
are some people in the system who are trying to get stuff out.
I've been wondering about the status of the FSI classes for a while
now. What does NYLXS need to get official recognition of its courses by
the state/city or whoever is responsible for authorizing reimbursable
programs? What sort of certification programs could be incorporated
into the FSI?
I know Selso mentioned contacting different Free Software application
developers to see what they would consider appropriate. He also
mentioned cataloging available educational software.
On Tue, 2003-05-20 at 23:31, Paul Robert Marino wrote:
> sorry i didnt get into this conversation earlier the last couple of days have been crazy but iv been reading all of the emails.
> there are a few things I would like to add first blackboard.altschools.org is NOT the only server our district has for teachers and students to use
> before you form an opinion on what we offer and what we dont check out these sites
> 1 http://students.altschools.org
> 2 http://teachers.altschools.org
> 3 http://www.altschools.org/schools/
> 4 http://www.edusolution.com/
> edusolutions is hosted and maintained by one of our teacher out of his home
> 5 http://blackboard.altschools.org/
> if you click on login it will bring you to a page were you can hit preview and see most of the online courses for many different schools in our district
> 6 http://tnellen.com/school/basic.html
> if any one wants to get involved in technology in education you have to look around Ted Nellen's site
> 7 http://teachers.altschools.org/courses/courses.php?course=23
>
> this should give you a better idea of what our teachers know and what we have been trying to get them to learn. our district has been working very hard for years to improve the use of technology in our schools. not every one uses these web portals. as a mater of fact most dont a lot of them use ssh and code there html in pico there are also many who use dreamweaver (i do not aprove of dream weaver) or the mozilla composer and ftp their files to teachers.altschools.org
> unfortunitly the services our district offers our schools is the exception not the rule. however at least for our schools we have been able to arange for our the servers to exist even though our district will be gone. the servers will be hosted out of one of our schools that has a dedicated independantly funded T1. the servers will be maintained by shantanu saha and my self.
>
> I was very disapointed by the presentations that were made they were not a good representation of our teachers but it did represent the ones who dont think they ave the time to learn html or are just to lazy to try which does represent the vast majority of teachers in the doe.
>
> as far as the Orical Acadamy
> there are a few realities of this the reason why they are using it is they are pragmatists. the teachers teaching it come from backrounds in english and math not computer science so when they are offered a quick easy solution to learn it and are given the curiculum for $3K and are alowed to issue their kids national recognized certifications for only $500 per teacher per year they jump at the chance. now dont get me wrong certification dose not mean they can do the job but it looks good to the people at state ed. and DoE and unfortunitly this is something they have to keep in mind. if the higher up dicide to look at their school they wont touch the orical acadamy for this reason. however they are very intrested in using linux desktops for the class for a multitude of reasons espesialy for the java programing part of the program. what might be a better aproch is to lach on to this existing program by augmenting it with maybe a perl DBI curiculum and maybe a more advanced ja!
va!
> curiculum. eventulay the program can be replaced by attrition if you dont let them know that thats your plan.
>
> here is what they nead on the techincal end
> a slashdot server would help but is not nessisary beacon schools students have writen a system in php and mysql for doing the same thing and made it avalible in a tar ball on their site. i dont like it for security reasons and wouldnt put it on my server but it works fairly well. what they do need is a authentication system that supports apple clients windows clients and linux clients in other words LDAP3 in a plug and play solution which has been what ive been working on for the last year. they nead a system to manage student accounts in an idiot proof interface i created a beta of just such a system in perl a year ago in my spare time a SuSE rpm can de downloaded from http://concord.altschools.org/~rob/gandolf_utils if your wondering why gandolf its because that was the nick name given to me by the district director of technology a few years ago when i first started working for the DoE and it stuck half the technoligy teachers in the district call me gandolf. also it has!
s!
> ome info about other project ive been working on however its out of date. I have not had time to update it since last summer.
> once there is a authentication system in place it makes it much easier to put linux workstations in the school because that is the big aurgument for windows and mac osx however both of them can be easly out done by a properly configured Linux box. as a mater of fact the school that did the presentation about orical hav told me multiple times as soon as i finish the system ive been working on they will implement Linux on their workstations and servers and the people have already taken multiple classes in how to use and administrate linux servers and have a red hat server running. infact at least fifteen of our schools use linux servers runing samba and netatalk as their file servers and primary domain controlers for their windows domains. we have traind atleast half of our thecnology coorinators in our school in how to install linux and configure samba and apache among many other services on both Red Hat and SuSE Linux.
>
> in the class room
> the teachers need curiculum that can be tought by a teacher with minimal training. lists of software they can use for catigorized by subject with short sets of tutorials on how to use them for differnet tasks ( mpeg videos would be nice). a web based test builder for creating exams for their classes that the students can login to take a test record the restlts and be graded imeadiatly linked into an online grade book system with the apropriate security that can be served on an intranet or web site. Ive often thought a curiculum for math in perl could not only be good for teaching math, programing, and meet the regence requierments to boot i just havent had the time to write it. last but not least a swift kick in the a$% when they say that teaching micro sh^! word is teaching technology.
>
>
> on a brighter note concords second stage redesign was finalized to day and will go to the state ed department for final aproval in the next couple of days. the plan was already aproved by our local state ed. rep. unfortunitly i was unable to get rid of that useless cisco ccna acadamy because it provides the students wiht ccna certification however in the plan it states that a Linux class will be a prerequesite for taking the cisco class and that draws kids because we are the only school on staten island that offers it to students that dont have a 90% or better average in the rest of their classes. i know of at least ten students who came to concord just to take cisco, two of which wer glued to a computer for hours to day because i showed them kstars and they decided "windows sucks" and they want to put Linux on their home computers. they were dumbfounded because they didnt know it was posible for a pc to do any thing like what kstars dose.
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