VITA-Learn & The National Center for Open Source and Education

are co-sponsoring

FOSSVT - 2010

Vermont's Open Source and Education Conference

Friday, April 9th, 2010

Lake Morey Inn

Fairlee, VT

2010 was a great success.  Stay tuned for an early announcement of what next year's conference will be.

FOSSVT 2010 Presentations:

Educational Leadership in a Flat Supervisory Union: A Practical Guide to Opening Up Vermont's Public Education System

Daniel French, Superintendent

The open source revolution has significant implications for Vermont's educational leaders as they work to expand and enhance learning opportunities for students. This presentation will highlight several system approaches that can move our schools forward in this area, and will explore state-level policy considerations necessary to sustain this work.

"Leveling the Playing Field" with Open Source applications and computers

Eric Hall, Technologist

Distributing open source applications and reconditioning retired computers has helped us improve home access for our students, moving us toward "digital equity" in our community. Open source applications are also helping us tackle compatibility issues. Come learn about the applications we have chosen for school and giveaway computers, and the strategies we are using to rebuild older computers for optimal functionality.

VirtualBox: True virtual machine platform portability.

Mike Lambert, Technologist

A look at Sun's VirtualBox platform for virtual machines. It's implementation and portability as a solution for free/open source for schools. Includes a comparison between VirtualBox and other virtualization platforms and storage options.

Storage Virtualization with ZFS

Bill McGonigle, Technologist

Do you have problems caused by having your disk storage spread across a large IT infrastructure? Is everything backed up? Are your drives healthy on all of your machines? Do you have excess capacity in one place and not enough in another? Has a corrupt filesystem ever ruined your day? Are you using the optimal amount of energy in your IT infrastructure?
By centralizing and virtualizing your storage infrastructure using free software and commodity hardware, you can achieve higher performance, dramatically higher storage densities, fault tolerance, and better ROI. You'll also make backups easier, enable replication, and provide for online point-in-time recovery with instant snapshotting.
This session will cover the concepts, basic configuration of a ZFS-based storage server, and connectivity of Linux, Macintosh and Windows clients. Pointers will be given for further learning.

Sugar Coating your Classroom

Caroline Meeks, Technology Evangelist

Sugar! Good for kids' minds and school budgets!
Sugar is the free open source kids operating system that boots from a USB stick! This means you can use Sugar on your existing classroom computer with out installing any new software. Kids can take them home and use them on their parents computers without effecting their computer.
Sugar is designed for learning at the K to 6th grade levels. It is used by a million kids on the One Laptop per Child XO computers including every child in the country of Uruguay! Sugar includes hundreds of free educational activities including: memorize games, simple word processing, simple mind mapping tool, programming for kids, music, art, learning activities and eBooks Galore! People around the world add more everyday. Put all this into your kid's pocket!

'Hacking Democracy' with Scratch

Tammie Patten, Teacher

Scratch is an easy and fun-to-use Open Source graphical programming language developed by MIT. It’s perfect for teaching basic programming concepts and skills. In fact, it is so easy to use that it also integrates well into general subject areas. In this seminar, we will take a look at a week-long classroom unit for students in grades 8-12 that looks at electronic voting machines and their implications for the democratic process. You’ll take away a copy of the lesson plan as well as a copy of the

“voting machine” program that students create using Scratch.

Technological Literacy: Combating the Digital Divide in an Afterschool Program

Bethany Silva, Mentor

Explore the triumphs and struggles of teaching technological literacy using free and open source software with youth from the King Street Center.

What's new in OpenSource Music Creation?

Dave Tisdell, Teacher

Rosegarden, the musical Swiss army knife, has just released a major upgrade. It has new features and a new code base. If you haven't looked at Rosegarden before, it is a sequencer, notation editor, and digital audio recorder. Right now Rosegarden is Linux only but the new code base makes porting to other operating systems much easier. MuseScore is a professional quality notation editor similar to Sibelius. It runs in Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. With support for a variety of file formats like music xml and MIDI, moving files in and out of different types of musical applications is a snap.

Open 1to1 – Netbooks and Open Source

David Trask, Teacher

Has your school been considering or exploring the possibility of deploying laptops or netbooks in a one to one or mobile classroom environment? Is the cost of deployment, training, and software making the decision difficult? When you factor in the cost of the equipment and then add the cost of software, licensing, and maintenance...you've increased the initial cost considerably. This additional cost of often what prevents schools from moving to laptops or netbooks as part of a their student technology program.

Open1to1.org was developed with this in mind. Helping schools adopt one to one or mobile computing solutions for the classroom without the burden of software acquisition and licensing that is associated with costly proprietary solutions. Schools all over New England (and the world) are using Open1to1 to provide a cost-effective computing solution for their schools. The folks at Open1to1.org have put together a "total solution" from the initial deployment to the development of a ready-made image for your students and teachers. A system administrator can go from a blank netbook or laptop to a fully imaged computer complete with all the educational software in less than 5 minutes! Ease of use, speed, and function are key components of the Open1to1 solution. Come and learn how Open1to1 can make one to one computing a reality in your school or classroom!

MythTV and VLC: How to capture, store, and access Broadcast or Cable Television on demand.

Michael Vining, Technologist

MythTV is an open source media center which hosts media files and with the addition of a supported TV-Tuner it can act as a DVR. VLC is an open source media player which can be used to play nearly any media available on a computer. Together you can capture live broadcasts and simultaneously store and multi-cast the event to all your LAN clients. The use of multi-cast greatly reduces the network bandwidth and server load and you can provide that stored recording on demand at a later date. This is a great way to minimize bandwidth and maximize exposure to current events.

Solving Problems with FOSS - what works and doesn't work in Vermont's libraries

Jessamyn West, Librarian

Vermont's own YouTube sensation, Jessamyn West will talk about her last several years working with small libraries in Orange County and describe the ups and downs of various FOSS projects from Ubuntu installs to Koha implementations to making people happy with Firefox."

Old School + New School = Better School

Deborah White, 2009 ACTEM Teacher of the Year Award recipient!

The Old School basics of the 3 R's - Reading, 'Riting, and 'Rithmetic can be effectively combined with New School FOSSed technology create a classroom of motivated, engaged students developing solid literacy skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Check out previous year's FOSSVT gatherings:

{2009}

{2008}