Speaker
Description
KDE software is tremendously useful for teaching. It greatly helps from teaching elementary school pupils to university level students. I believe that acceptance for using free and open source software in teaching environments has recently risen given increased attention on digital sovereignty.
Given these circumstances, I was allowed to participate in two projects bringing KDE to local pupils and students last year. I would like to share some takeaways from these projects to hopefully motivate others to run similar projects. The perceived open mindedness to using KDE software in schools is certainly a great incentive.
One of the projects took place in a local elementary school. It started with a 1000 Euro grant which was used to organize hardware to set up a popup computer lab. We were able to furnish seven individual computer workstations, each powered by a Raspberry Pi 7.
Given these computers, we ran multiple sessions splitting a class' students in two groups so two students could collaborate per workplace. All of the RPs run KDE as sole desktop environment. We started with multiple sessions using Gcompris and eventually moved forward to smaller programming exercises and even assignments involving electronic components.
The other project involves the evolution of two lecture rooms at a local
vocational school. One of them is a pure Linux lab and the other is a dual
boot lecture room. Both use KDE as main desktop environment. The key here
is probably how we slowly increased acceptance from other teachers and how
we are planning to spread KDE software further.
The great acceptance of the above projects clearly shows that KDE offers great features for teaching. From pupils touching a keyboard for the very first time to students of post-secondary computer science programs.
Biography
I've been teaching for 25+ years and gave conference talks and lectures in at least six different countries. Most of my talks focused on open source software but included a variety of other topics as well. Currently, I work as a teacher in an advanced vocational school, being responsible for the computer science department as well as a our Linux server infrastructure and some lecture rooms.
Social Links
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerald-senarclens-de-grancy-92a30a19/
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