I just had a meeting with all of the computing teachers at the Diego Thomson. Actually it was supposed to be with all of them, but only two (of about five or so) showed up - well it’s a start. With the people who were there we had some great discussion about Open Source education at the Diego and about how I can proceed with my project. It was at times a bit difficult to follow the discussion, but I believe I got most of the points.
It was also an opportunity to ask some question. I was mainly interested in how teaching with the current (quite new) curriculum works. It turns out that there are still some reservations about replacing Visual Basic (from the old curriculum) with Python (the new curriculum). There seem to be two main points about that. First, the existing teachers don’t know Python as well as Visual Basic. That’s easy to solve and the headmistress made it very clear that the teachers must either adapt to the new curriculum or be replaced with teachers who are able to teach it. The second point was, that they fear Python does not have the commercial backing so that students could then go on and work for some company. Well first, Visual Basic is not really commercially used. I don’t know where they got that idea. Second, Python is used by many companies (also see the Job openings). And I also explained to them that Python is probably the best language to teach. It teaches clear style (indentions for example) and is easily understood (though that’s not that true for non-English-speaking people). Hm, what about a Spanish translation of the Python programming language… :-)
“Hello world” would then look like
imprime "Hola mundo"
Or a loop might look like:
mientras x<=10:
imprime x, x*10
Anyway, back to the meeting. We then talked a bit about the Linux environment. When I explained to them what Skolelinux can do for us, they were very excited. I already wrote about the profiles earlier. With that it's possible to install a Skolelinux network very easily without much technical knowledge. You can choose a Server or Workstation profile (and others, particularily thin client / thin client server) and the installer will then automatically set up a network with central log in, central home directories, proxy server, other servers and also tons of education software. Independently of my plans, they said that central home directories would be very nice. I already had planned on that, so that's a go.
We also checked what technologies I'll have to teach to the professors. I'll probably show them how install and administer a Linux network, GUI programming using Boa Constructor and open source replacements for software like Photoshop (replaced by Gimp), Corel Draw (OpenOffice Draw, Sodipodi or Inkscape), Page Maker (Scribus) and FrontPage (shudder but can happily be replaced with Nvu).
And in the end we also talked about computing education for the other two branches of study (primaria and inicial). They have 200 hours to learn some computing and I'm going to write a proposal of how to use this 200 hours until next Monday.