[Inschool] LyX and others

[Ralph M. Deal]

Interesting new listserv formed from SEUL and ....  Here is a recent 
posting that I found quite interesting.  LyX looks great for schools 
(and perhaps for me).  I tried installing it in a cygwin on my wife's ME 
system but some software it needed was not installed.  I'm now going to 
try installing it on RH9.

I found Marilyn Hagle's comments useful in general and shall try to get 
it to some educator friends.

Any new school LINUX installations out there?  The entire Munich 
computer system is being converted to LINUX, version yet to be 
determined but SUSE seems likely (a german corporation and active in 
getting LINUX started in Munich).  I'm going to be in Munich for the 
next few years and may be able to help schools get teachers ready to use it.

     Ralph

PS: Marilyn, where and at what level do you teach?

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [school-discuss] what pieces of software would you demo to 
K-12 teachers ?
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 11:05:23 -0600
From: Marilyn Hagle <Marilyn.Hagle@gpisd.org>
Reply-To: schoolforge-discuss@schoolforge.net
To: <schoolforge-discuss@schoolforge.net>

Hello,

I am a K-12 teacher person.

I have seen OpenOffice, The Gimp, Moziilla, and all of the Knoppix
flavor CDs mentioned.  I use the former in class and send the CDs home
with the kids.  They are wonderful.

I also want to mention LyX - which is such a great writing tool and very
easy to use.

Make sure you bring out a few simple features . . . all of the apps that
save as or export to a pdf - teachers like that.  Easy web pages created
in OO Impress and Mozilla Composer.

Also, KWord, KGhostview, and Konqueror all will "print as poster."
Teachers will go crazy over that feature too.

KDE used to offer this and Gnome still does . . . the dictionary in the
taskbar.  That is a fabulous tool.

For advanced graphics, Blender3D has turned out to be a really exciting
apps.  Once students master the basic tools, they can create anything.

Marilyn

 >>> tim@whyintheworld.org 02/18/04 9:19 AM >>>

Hi,

If you had just a brief time in which to demo open source software to a
bunch of K-12 teachers...(who were new to the whole OS thing, and not 
necessarily convinced it was all that great)...the point being to wow 
them with what OS could do for them, so they want to explore further...
... what pieces of software would you demo?  (Again, just briefly, so
they get the gist of what it does & how they'd really benefit.)

Note #1: Part of the the point is some of their schools might accept
donated hardware in the near future, so if the K12 Linux Terminal Server 
or Linux in general is to be an viable option, there needs to be a lot 
of attraction to the software that can run on it.

Note #2: I've glanced through SEUL/Edu.  The case studies are appealing
to sys admins more than to teachers, and the application list is not 
ranked such that I can pick out, say, the 5 most popular.  I looked at 
the reviews area, but the only one that jumped out as a clear winner 
there was moodle, with several positive reviews.