[vox-outreach] [fwd] Info for child development conference

[Bill Kendrick]

I asked the readers of schoolforge's mailing list what kinds of topics and
software would be good to demonstrate and discuss at the Child Development
Conference and here's some feedback:

----- Forwarded message from Gary Dunn -----

Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2008 21:12:10 HST
Subject: Re: [school-discuss] Info for child development conference

> I was going to exhibit Tux Paint at a local County-wide
> "Child Development Conference" in California, then it occured to me that
> it makes more sense for the Linux User Group in the area to go, and
> talk about Open Source software _in general_.
> 
> If that happens, what kind of apps should we show off, and focus our
> handout materials on?
> 
> We have some old, dated handout materials talking about OSS that's 
arguably
> suitable for this event:
> 
> http://lugod.org/documents/handouts/free-computer-software-trifold-2007-
05.pdf
> 
> I might have time to put something 'fresher' together, though... so
> suggestions welcome. :)

Focusing on the child development conference, I'm at a complete loss as to 
what to expect. Educational alternatives ... public vs private vs home 
schooling? Psychology? Learning disabilities / ADHD / dyslexia etc? 

I am a longtime fan of Smalltalk, and was playing with Squeak five years 
ago. I bet it is even better now. http://www.squeak.org/

When talking to parents of youngish children who want their kids to get on-
line but are frustrated by malware, pitch the relative safety of an open-
source browser running on something besides Windows. 

Two hot areas for high school are audio and video editing. Consider 
Audacity and Cinelerra. I have used Audacity on Mac OS X and it works 
great.  I have never used Cinelerra.

For a broader audience I suggest you add something on server based 
applications like Open Admin, Moodle, MediaWiki, Drupal, etc. FOSS has a 
lot to offer beyond the PC.

Gary Dunn
Open Slate
Project

----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
-bill!
bill at newbreedsoftware.com
http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/