[K12OSN] OT : Ideas for K12LTSP usage?

[Lee Harr]

>I have a curious request.  The director of the school where I volunteer
>has asked me what innovative ways are out there to use K12LTSP in place
>of more traditional approaches to IT beyond the simple use of thin
>clients in classrooms.


I keep seeing the "no educational software" thread pop up (which
usually means that reader rabbit or something is hard to set up on
Linux), but there is seriously some amazing software available that
I think is going unnoticed.

Things like ...
kalzium
kstars
kig
kmplot

Or even just things like ...
Python
R
matplotlib
ODE
... which are "programming" tools or languages, but are so useful
that it is sad that our students are not being introduced to them.
(All students. Not just those learning computer programming)

I also think that all the LAN power out there is mostly being
wasted. The students just want to "get on the internet", but
hook them up with a nice LAN game (bzflag works well) and
then start to imagine the possibilities.

We found a nice game today called xtux. It is a bit on the gory
side (so may not be appropriate everywhere) but I was really
impressed how at first they were just blowing each other up,
but by the end of the period they had figured out that they
needed to work together to destroy the real enemies. Nice!

Or how about some collaborative projects? Introduce kids
to the idea of revision control (A little subversion never hurt
anyone...)

Collaborative note taking... Every class could have a wiki.

Every class should definitely have a web page.

I don't think any of this depends on using k12ltsp, but I think
it does require the kind of thinking that led to k12ltsp.

We need to teach kids how to use the networks. They need
to know how to find the existing networks that can help with
existing problems, and how to create new networks for the
problems that have never been addressed before.

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