[School-GNU-Linux] Software Freedom day @ Chenganoor

Forwarded message from Githin, EC student, Chenganoor Engineering College
----

Report on the SFD event for College of Engineering Chengannur. The
report and photos are on this page:
http://softwarefreedomday.org/gallery/2006/india/kerala/college_of_engg_chengannur

The Software Freedom Day was conducted on 29th of September 2006 by
the College of Engineering Chengannur.

As the part of the celebration, we spent the whole day at two State
Government run schools nearby. They are supposed to be studying
GNU/Linux as a part of their syllabus but they are not doing it fully
as the staff has not received enough training.

So 13 students from our college (we have a FLOSS cell at college) went
to this school and we conducted a whole day training with laptops and
multimedia projectors. The training was attended by around 250
students and 6 staff members. We installed a customized CD called
"IT@School" on the computers in the labs which had only Windows
earlier. And we rectified the "Xserver not loading problem" on some
machines which were branded as "not working". Some computers were also
not functional as the video memory was not allocated properly. And
some machines had worn out BIOS batteries. We changed them also.

So altogether, we helped two schools set up their labs properly,
installed necessary software so that they could teach the next batch
of students in a good way.

We divided ourselves in to five teams. One team consisting of Pramod
and Prashanth handled the training for the staff members. Another team
consisting of Aparna, Shaj, Joseph and Stephen talked about "Freedom,
Software Freedom Day and about why we should not use proprietary
software etc". The third team consisting of Anjali and Githin taught
how to use a GNU/Linux system by going in to menus and other GNOME
features, they also demonstrated certain useful software. The fourth
team consisting of Sharika and Anurag taught tuxpaint, GIMP, gcompris
etc. Allen and Ameen made up the fifth team and they went around
teaching Open Office tools. Jayakrishnan was running up and down
fixing up venues and doing all the necessary work to ensure that the
classes go on well.

We divided the students in to 4 teams. Each team consisted of around
60 students. Then we arranged four venues which consisted of two
computer labs and two halls. One hall had a laptop and a multimedia
projector.

We invited students to do small animations and paintings and gave away
chocolates and CDs as prizes. We had bought 300 pieces of chocolates
for the students and around 60 ubuntu CDs and some GNU/Linux stickers.
All of us pooled in money to buy the chocolates.

After the talks got over, we conducted a small quiz. We asked about
things we had taught them today and generally about The students
definitely liked them. Finally, we conducted an oral feedback session
and the general opinions were "it was a very nice time" "we had so much
fun" "please come again" "we learned so much". The schools also gave
us "thank you" letters for our work. They all agreed that only "Free
Software" should be used in schools.

--
Cheers :-)
githinATgmailDOTcom
Free as in Freedom
http://githin.googlepages.com/

--
Free Software, Free Society <http://fsfs.hipatia.net>
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