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Paul Sutton wrote: > james kilty wrote: >> Hello >> >> I have had a delightful exchange with the head of ICT at Falmouth School >> as a result of inviting a member of staff and a student or 2 to the >> Penzance Open sessions. At the end of the eachange I offered a >> demonstration of GNU/Linux to A-Level students. His reply will tax me >> somewhat so I offer it to you for guidance. As always, if I do anything >> like this I will gladly defer to a more expert member if anyone is up to >> accompanying me. Here is his reply. >> >> "I may well accept your invitation to come in and demonstrate some of >> your software. As well as the obvious if you have any free and easy to >> use multimedia software that you could show that would be great. >> > >> Students have to create e-books and we currently use Macromedia >> Dreamweaver with some dropping down to PowerPoint and saving as html. >> Some students are producing a multimedia presentation and will at >> present use PowerPoint then convert it to flash using a conversion >> program. >> Any ideas you have in this area would be well appreciated. I'd say as an alternative to Dreamweaver maybe NVU or Kompozer (which AFAIK is a fork of NVU which is being actively worked on after NVU development was stopped to work on Mozilla Composer). I'd suggest putting across the fact that NVU (or Kompozer) is free, they could give students copies to use at home. Okay, some students will run pirate software anyway but if the school starts teaching NVU or something then the kids are more likely to use it at home. Actually, wouldn't the school be better teaching HTML/PHP/CSS or whatever is used rather than how to use an application? >> Students also have to talk about the digital divide and free industry >> standard software such as Star Office can help close this. If you are >> serious about your offer perhaps we could discuss exactly what you have >> to offer , what our students need and come up with a cunning plan." >> Possibly an idea for the students would be to distribute copies of The Open Disc (www.theopendisc.com) which is a new project as far as I know to replace The OpenCD (it says more about it on TheOpenDisc.com web site). This would certainly be a start, and a good alternative for parents rather than paying £100 a pop for a student/teacher copy of MS Office. >> Ideas please. >> >> Thanks >> > As far as I am aware staroffices is NOT free, it may be free to > students but its the paid for version of Openoffice.org which is free of > charge, and open source, (I am not going to say its Free software as I > am unsure, comments on this welcome). > > Star / openoffice AFAIK can export to swf, does anyone have experience > with this. > I've just given SWF exporting a try, I downloaded a PowerPoint presentation and exported it as PDF. It looks (from initial playing around) that it supports exporting of slides but not fancy effects although I could be wrong. I'm not sure if there are any other FLOSS applications that export/create Flash files. > As for the digital divide I think Tom B has excellent expertise in this > area, with his projects sending hardware / software to Africa for use in > schools, There are many other examples on the web regarding how OSS is > really helping education overseas, and that is just education. In > addition doing this does also stop good working computers ending up in > landfill in the UK. It's certainly an area which might be of interest to businesses. I discussed this with Mark Cross & Rick Timmis of the Open Source Consortium, I said about getting some sort of organisation setup which companies could take PCs to and have them recycled (The Inquirer ran a story about a charity in the states which took in old PCs and monitors and had helpers refurbish them), we need something like this which doesn't strip the computers down for parts that are sold on eBay but instead clean the PCs, wipe the hard drives (to some sort of government standard) and then prepare them for re-deployment into the community either into community centres or peoples homes. > > Members of the lug such as my self and Rob Beard, are looking at getting > OSS into a community centre in Exeter, LTSP networks. We just need some > help getting this off the ground, time, money or other expertise, > which I think Rob is working on. Yep, I've been in contact with Rick Timmis about this a little while back, from what I understand the community centre organiser is interested in a couple of PCs, I've asked about the community centre getting a grant from the Gemini FM Charitable Trust as they are a charity and the grant would pay for some equipment (in this case a server and a couple of screens). I've got to get the PCs that I have in the garage sorted out when I have time. I've also offered assistance to a local gymnastics club which my youngest goes to. They're based in Torquay and have moved to a new location in Barton (across from Barton Medical Centre) and needed help with things like painting and decorating amongst other things and also help with computers and phones. I instantly thought of LTSP and Asterisk or something along those lines. I've yet to hear back from them, I think they're a bit busy still with building work but I've asked my other half to say we have a merry band of IT folk who want to help (I'm willing to give my time for free, and I'm sure there's bound to be a few more of you folks who could possibly help one way or another - for instance advice on setting up asterisk?). > I am sure we can come up with some good ideas. Sure we can, even better if we can get some of these ideas in motion. Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html