#97: High Tech in Education, anyone?

Schoolforge.net is  an interesting site that collects free and open source software for use in education.

SchoolForge's mission is to unify independent organizations that advocate, use, and develop open resources for education. We advocate the use of open texts and lessons, open curricula, free software and open source in education.

One section of the site highlights some of the best software applications, for uses such as education assessment and evaluation, cirriculum planning, and teaching education. Learning management systems & Course management systems and administrative tools to fit various needs of schools.

To mention a few:

Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a 50,000-student University. Moodle is one of the most popular CMS out there.

Open Admin for Schools  - is entirely web based and can run from a centrally located division wide server or a single computer in a school. It is designed to support an entire division on one or more central computers but can also work just fine for a single school. Currently several school divisions use this approach and have 15+ schools on a single central server. This is because it is designed to be lightweight both in server resource requirements and in communication bandwidth.

 SchoolTool will draw members of the education community: staff, students, parents, alumni and administrators into a tight-knit community with instant access to relevant information. SchoolTool will not depend on a technology-intensive environment, but in those schools with broad and deep access to technology in the form of computers, laptops, PDA's, cellphones and wireless pagers, SchoolTool will leverage those forms of communication and devices to deliver the right information to the right person at the right time.

 These are great technology tools that can improve the way teachers teach and communicate with student. And the best thing is it's free and it's so easy to implement using cheap computers.

Such solutions can be a cheap for the entire public education in the Philippines to use. I would love to be involved for such a project. Maybe a pilot project in Abra (e.g. Abra High School) could be launched to prove it's viability.

So what about it sir Panchet? are you up for the challenge?