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The Vermont Open Source and Education Conference 2008 (FOSSVT)

Friday, April 4, 2008 - Lake Morey Inn - Fairlee, VT

8:30 AM - 4:00 PM

 

Expected 25, hoped for 50 and 92 attendees arrived!

The Vermont Open Source and Education Conference showed how Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is being used throughout Vermont and will help teachers, technology coordinators and administrators start using FOSS solutions in their own schools.

The FOSSVT conference included the following presentations :

  • Why Use FOSS – (Because the natives are restless!). David Trask, Maine's 2007 Technology Educator of the Year and creator of the FOSSEd conference series will talk about the value and excitement of using Open Source solutions in schools.
  • Student Ambassadors for Open Source Tech Savvy Kids at St. Albans City School share their journey in bringing open source software into their school to promote digital equity, including outreach to the community, their teachers, and their peers. They have successfully installed Edubuntu on donated hardware and are exploring Open Office and other open source software applications.
  • Edubuntu LTSP – For the technicians Designed for the technicians, this session will be a how-to integrate Linux thin clients into an Active Directory Network. LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) is a great way to reuse your old computers or inexpensively add new workstations to classrooms.
  • FOSS Around the World – INGOTs We all know Open Source is the future and effective education has the future firmly in mind. But we also know how hard it is to get people to change technologies especially when they have to move out of their comfort zone to do so? What if we had something that could be accepted by even the most entrenched closed source users but educated them about FOSS? This talk at FOSSVT is about lowering barriers to entry, taking people from where they are to where we want them to be and how to make this economically independent. INGOTs supports a service model that has the capacity to sustain all the digital resources needed to support K 12 learning free for everyone in the world based on a sound business model that is already working in the UK.
  • Scratching Your Gaming Itch: Using Scratch to teach students programming. Using the new graphics programing environment Scratch from M.I.T., Bob Sargent will explain how it is more fun for 12 year olds to design and build games than to just play them.
  • FOSS Programs for Early Ed.: Renee Kittler will talk about Edubuntu in her kindergarten classroom. By the end of the first day, she needed to assign computer time because the students all wanted to use the Edubuntu computers. This presentation will be an overview of some of the programs available for this age group.
  • Introduction to Moodle: Joseph Thibault will highlight the popular, open source learning management system (LMS) known as Moodle. Attendees will learn about its capabilities as seen from both the teacher and student view. Moodle is a free resource for teachers across the globe, which allows them to easily add digital resources to their current classrooms, reduce waste and turn their classroom into a 24 hour learning environment. Current and future uses of the platform in the US will be discussed.
  • Linux Server Setup - Parts 1 & 2 In this two-part session, two veteran linux systems administrators (Marion Bates & Bill Stearns) will demonstrate the basics of a linux server setup, starting with a standard PC and a linux CD and ending with a functional network server capable of performing services for web, MySQL (database), DNS, or email -- or more. All the hands-on steps of installing Linux and setting up basic network services will be covered in a live, from-scratch installation.
  • Taking Control of Your Network with FLOSS Computer networks are growing both in complexity and importance, yet it can often be hard to diagnose problems, especially when they're intermittent or only happen to some people. Fortunately, several excellent open source tools exist which let you stay on top of your network and let you know about and fix problems before your users even notice. This talk will be a tour of several of the most popular and useful packages, a demonstration of what they look like running in real scenarios, and how you can use them to monitor and diagnose your network.
  • The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Free Music David Tisdell, one of the original FOSS pioneers in VT, has been blending his love of music and Open Source and will present on using FOSS tools for creating and editing music.

 

You also view the schedule of presentations.

Finally, unlike some conferences where a few people get to take home software they have won, EVERYONE left FOSSVT with software worth thousands of dollars and that is *before* they multiplied it by the number of students with whom they can share it (since it is Open Source!).

The cost was $125.00. This cost included lunch.