Re: [seul-edu] Feedback needed from teachers for the

[Anne-Marie MAHFOUF <a-m.mahfouf@lineone.net>]

Hi,

> Are there any
> repositories of education open source software other than SEUL.
Any
> Africa or development related material?

The KDE-Edu project started only in September 2001 so most of the
software is
in its infancy...... However, KStars is a mature application (a
planetarium).
KLettres teaches the French alphabet for very young children. KGeo
is an
interactive geometry learning program and KTouch helps you typing.

The KDE project just released KDE3.0 and it includes the Edutainment
package
(as we call eduware).
Why is this really interesting?
Because KDE is translated in more than 50 languages. That means that
the
educational software that is included with KDE3 is translated in all
those
languages. By translation we mean the menus and the doc. KLettres
for example
will still teach French but the interface will be in the language
you use for
your KDE desktop.

What we want to do now is to internationalize our software: KLettres
could be
used to teach other languages for example. But this is not a
translation
matter: you don't learn the russian alphabet as you learn the french
one.
This is where we need competent people.

 > Finally what would be the
> killer top 10 (or so) of OS software that we should distribute on
CD
> to our participants from abroad  [ in particular primary school,
> even early years stuff for both Teachers and Learners].

See http://edu.kde.org. As I said, it is early development but the
willing to
do something is there. We have an enthusiastic team of developers
and
artists. We need teachers and parents for guidance.
The Debian project has a Debian Junior section.

>The workshop
> and follow-up will sollicit feedback from African Educationists
and
> others that may also help the KDE-EDU project.
>
> Any help much appreciated.

If you could provide us with some ideas and some people willing to
help
(testing a prog and sending a note on how to improve it does not
require too
much time) that would be very constructive.

Ultimately, I think we could provide schools with a special KDE
desktop which
would contain only the elements needed for the educational software.
It could
even run Windows software through wine.
We are not there yet but we could achieve it faster if we group our
ideas and
our resources.

I wish you great success in your workshop!

Anne-Marie