Good question, perhaps a bit late to be useful
Guada-, like in most rivers in Andalucía, including the
main one, the river the Romans called Betis and we call
Guadalquivir
+ the Linux from EXtremadura, our sister region
pioneering in the usage of free software in schools.
The history of ICT in the Andalusian educational system
The Guadalinex project is not the first project having to do with ICT and education in
Andalucía
But not everything has been a success
Some introductory figures
| Andalucía | |
|---|---|
| Area | 87,268 km² -- 2nd ES |
| Population | 8,039,399 (2007) -- 1st ES |
| Density | 92.12 inhab./km² |
| Unemployment rate | 13.85% (the Spanish average is 9.16%) |
| Per capita Income | ~US$23,120 (just 75.5% of the UE-25 average, qualifies for European aids) |
Computers are in the classrooms
As many computers as the school staff thinks necessary
(four modes are possible: one desktop every two students,
ICT corners with two/three computers,
desktops for groups of 6-8 students or shareable laptops).
A huge single network, administered centrally (it is planned that in a few years all
Andalusian schools will be ICT schools).
Two servers in each school, providing
firewire, proxy, cache, NFS homes and contents service.
As we said Guadalinex is the name
of the customized distribution of
the regional government of Andalucía.
Developed by local companies through a public tender (the tender for V5 was announced on the 28th of September 2007), the present version, V4.1, is an Ubuntu derivative that had an open development and a one-year cycle.
A two-year cycle in schools:
By demand of the teachers it was
decided that no update should be made for two years.
Why?
1.- Upgrades are difficult. Remote massive upgrades are a nightmare.
A two-year cycle in schools:
By demand of the teachers it was
decided that no update should be made for two years.
Why?
2.- Generic distributions, even if they include some school useful tools or a client-server infrastructure like ltsp, are not educational iff
A two-year cycle in schools:
By demand of the teachers it was
decided that no update should be made for two years.
Why?
3.- The agency responsible of managing Guadalinex in the schools needs time to adapt the new version to the schools' infrastructure and hardware, to create the educational packages missing and to install the new distro in the computers of the new schools in the project, plus upgrading the old ones.
4.- Teachers want a stable system.
The Advanced Management Centre (in Spanish CGA) of ICT Schools was created as a consequence of Decree 72/2003.
Its tasks are
No-one in the school is supposed to be a hacker - ICT coordinators are teachers. These are five out of hundreds.
In theory, the coordinators' task is the pedagogical dynamization of the schools (sic). In practice they (or an ICT coordination team) have to recognize technical problems, call the helpdesk or cope with petty hardware glitches, and administer the local accounts and the school's LMS.
Teacher training in Andalusia, organized by the regional educational authorities, is free for all teachers in 32 training centres.
Over 20% of the whole training effort (courses, conferences...) is allocated to ICT training.
ICT schools have priority in training demands, and a training advisor is assigned to each school.
Averroes, "The Andalusian telematics network"
is the name of the educational portal of Andalucía.
Although the portal has existed since 1998, providing news, resources and hosting to the schools, we have had access to the alfa versions of the new Averroes, full of new and interesting possibilities.
RSS feeds and the active participation of the teachers are key features of the new site.
Of the tools available, BARTIC was the most demanded and the longest
waited for.
BARTIC is a resources repository and indexer. The idea behind it is to create an index of the quality resources already in Averroes, as assessed by experts in each of the educational fields, and after that to start adding new valuable resources.
It will permit social tagging, tag clouds and even personal portfolios.
Free software in schools, two independent challenges often mixed up:
Need for real educational distributions: tools to reuse and share resources (browse, find, use, assess, adapt, improve, comment...)
Need for a previous reflexion on the role of computers in schools. Just a tool? That means nothing
Legal Note: this document has a Creative Commons 2.5 Licence with clauses Recognition - Share alike and Spanish jurisdiction.
All the tools used to create this presentation (especially Slidy) and the resources used are believed to be free, at least for non commercial usage. Please inform me of any mistake you find.
Thank you for your patience.
Doubts, questions, suggestions...?
The tools the CGA designed for the use of the coordinators are documented at the CGA site.