From Kannur,
It is a true fact that there are many schools who really wanted to use Free Software based alternatives in their school. If we can give sufficient awareness and support to the teaching community there will be a large number of school who will use Free software products in their curriculum. For the last couple of years, I have provided substantial support to schools by installing GNU/Linux systems and promoted the use of Free Software solutions in schools. From my experience it is clear that both teachers and students are now well aware of Free software alternatives and they really liked it and some of them even appreciated that it is better than MS. In fact Kannur was the first district in India, where MP( Member of Parliament) development fund was used to provide computer education using Free Software. We had implemented LTSP based diskless solutions for as many 43 govt. schools in district and it was in 'news' at that time. But hardly 3 or 4 of them now exist. Many schools were forced(?) to buy disks and use pirated softwares. Master trainees were told of only 'MS' and there were "hidden hands" which did not like use of Free Software.Add to that, the so called "first in the world" Softexam did not work on terminal servers. Many schools were told to use MS Software to conduct the IT exam.
Situations have now changed, teachers and students are more aware now. At Kannur more & more schools shows interest in installing and using Morphix based GNU/Linux cd for IT@SCHOOL project.
During this academic year ,I have supported the following schools with installation and training.
1.St Thomas High School,Kiliyanthara,Iritty (6 machines, (two of the old machine upgraded to 128RAM only for installing It@school Linux). After one day workshop, teachers told that it is better than windows.
2.Govt Higher Secondary School Chittariparamb.( 11 Machines, five old and rest new P4 machines.Seminar on GNU/LINUX and inauguration of IT CLUB held on JULY 13,and students found more interest than teachers.)
3.St Josephs High School,Karikkottakkari,Iritty (Five machines. One machine with even 64 MB ram is running Linux.Students are getting training on GNU/linux only (For 8th std)
4.Govt Higher Secondary Pala ,(15 Machines .Students already appeared for Linux Lab exam. This year there was no notification to conduct IT Lab exam even for 10 th students.
5.Govt Higher Secondary, Valapatnam
6.Govt Vocational Higher Secondary, Edayanoor
7.Govt Higher Secondary, Thottada
8.Govt Higher Secondary, ChattuvaIn all the above schools 8th standard students are only learning GNU/Linux and applications .
The Pattiam Memorial panchayat High School at Cheruvanchery is the one among the only GNU/LINUX schools of Kerala. Here the thin Clients (10 Nos) are running under RH9 ( I am trying to replace it with IT@School debian installation by installing LTSP on this server. Some tweaking is required for this.) This is the only school where you CAN NOT see MS in their computers and for the last three years all the students and teachers only use & knows GNU/LINUX. In fact it is the school where we struggled to get Softexam work in GNU/Linux and the teachers showed good spirit not to use MS even under pressure.
Teachers training are now going on only for GNU/Linux and One Training Center CERIT,Kuthuparamb has only GNU/linux as the OS.
In addition to this list there are many more schools using GNU/Linux installed by the school teachers themselves. Majority of them are in rural areas.It is difficult to coordinate with all of them as most of the teachers have no email-id to communicate with. But it is really a good sign that there is a positive change towards alternatives to proprietory solutions.
Altogether there is progress and we can hope to have batches of students who are open to the world of free/open source technologies and hopefully they will be able to contribute more to the cause. Consider that a high percentage of them will be from rural villages.
It is important that these small achievements get due highlight and we should find the media reporters who can report positive images to the world and give propaganda to that.
That's all from Kannur.
Regards,
Sujeevan S2S2, Kannur, Kerala. (M):09447449107 email:s2s2service@gmail.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Get CDs from S2S2: Slackware10.2,Debian Sarge,CentOS 4,Fedora 4, Mandrive2005,K12LTSP,Gentoo2005,FreeBSD,HOWTO cd, PHOENIX LiveCD,Ubuntu,LAMPPIX,KNOPPIX, SLAX,and VigyaanCD. You can buy PHOENIX, India's First PC interface kit under GNU/Linux( www.nsc.res.in http://www.nsc.res.in) from S2S2. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 98,2 Bot