Fred is now submitting the Chinese version upstream to make it available for everybody.  The TuxTyping developers have been very responsive and helpful with our translation problems and fixing minor bugs we found. We are now even working with them to make it workable for Chinese input method, as only pinyin typing is available currently. Hopefully we will have something ready to test soon.

In no time thanks to volunteers and passionate people like us, we went from nothing available in Chinese to a great looking software that will even deal with the Chinese language specificities. That’s the reason why I love Open Source; its community and its spirit definitely ROCK!

TuxTyping is an educational typing tutor for kids starring Tux, the Linux penguin.

There are four different kids of typing games for kids to practise typing.

Tux the penguin is hungry, and loves to eat fish. But Tux can only catch the fish if you type the right letters in time!

There are over 40 exercises learning the finger position of each letter and punctuation

1. give awards and recognitions to volunteers and migrant schools teachers (and RMB 50,000 red pocket will go to 99 teachers during the coming Chinese New Year, it was announced by Mr. Xu from Narada Foundation during the event)
2. give subsidies to Migrant workers’ families (a total of RMB 600,000 to 300 families)
3. enjoy the day with nice songs and dance (it was definitely a very nice show for all of us)
4. panel discussions trying to solve problems

It was a very successful event with over 400 participants. The whole venue was seated with migrant workers families and migrant schools teachers as well as volunteers coming from different NGOs all focusing on helping migrant workers families. It was also full of touching stories and hot discussions about how to improve the quality of living for migrant workers families. It was very nice to see that so many organizations were concerned about this society problem. But we all know that subsidy can only help in the short term, policy and education are the only long term solution. In order to solve the root problem the society should provide migrant workers with trainings in order to be able to access better job opportunities and their children with free and decent quality education. We should definitely invite the government and Ministry of Education to participate in these kinds of events and panel discussions Yes, it’s time to nurture and be responsible for migrant workers!

Awards given to volunteers from different organizations all over China

RMB 2,000 subsidy was given to 300 selected Migrant Workers' families

Gardener Awards were given to 99 selected teachers from different Migrant Schools

Volunteers dancing with 4 volunteering children, nice performance!

A few folk songs by a Chinese famous singer

Different Panel Discussions by NGO organizers, teachers, volunteers and even media

The main reason of our visit was to give formal training to the English teacher (whom I mentioned in my previous blog post). For this session, we tried to deliver a class that would enable her to teach at the end of the course. We managed to build a new 2 hours class focusing on:

1. Concepts of Computer, FOSS and Open Education in education (10 mins)
2. Hardware and Operating System introduction (30 mins)
3. Apps to teach English (30 mins)
4. Italc classroom management system (30 mins)
5. Q&A (20 mins)

The purpose of the shortening of the initial teacher training class is mainly due to the high turn over rate of teachers in Migrant Schools. After 2 hours of training, the teacher take the Gdium home and practices with it during her spare time. Any question is then directed to either Miss Liu who is already trained (and of course ourselves).

This time again, at the end of the training section, the Maths teacher this time popped in and expressed her interest to join the training next time. It seems that word of mouth is doing wonder at Wende School hopefully we can spread the word all over China soon!

A real computer class of Gcompris, not demo class any longer!

Teaching children how to use keyboard and mouse with Gcompris

Concept of FOSS, Operating System and Educational Apps training

Italc Classroom Management System Training

Computer classes are already incorporated in their existing school program

Happy kids in Wende School!

Everyday hundreds of thousands of children from migrant workers families who are building modern China fail to receive proper education and can’t get basic computer teaching, leaving them even more behind and increasing the digital divide. The complexity of addressing education needs for the part of the Chinese population requires a lot of problems to be solved and computer access is only one of the problems. However computers coupled with the possibilities of accessing the Internet will give them the chance to discover and access invaluable content which can secure their future and give them access to job they didn’t even know existed!

Delivering proper computer based education to poor schools issues range from electricity consumption from a full classroom (one normal PC can easily consume 60 to 200W, multiplied by 20 or 50…), teacher knowledge about IT and integration of the digital tool into their curriculum, content cost and licensing, and of course computers cost.

Today in Wende we have managed to address all the problems above thanks to technology, vision, and collaboration from various parties. The Chinese Academy of Sciences has built a general purpose low powered CPU that runs free software and which enables to consume as low as 15-17W per machine at a very competitive price, enabling manufacturers such as Lemote and Dexxon to build some of the cheapest netbooks on the market.

Thanks to Dexxon for its contributions and sponsorship of the classroom, WenDe today has a fully equipped 20 Gdiums Loongson based set up. Dexxon has sponsored Mandriva, a French Linux software company to bring the latest technology on the Loongson architecture and customized a Linux distribution for education.

Furthermore non-profit organizations such as Greenboard and LEAD have been building the education material together with teachers and released them under an Open Source license so any school can use them for free, modify and improve as they wish.

The last part has been completed by Greenboard and CSIP who are also graciously training the group of selected teachers by WenDe’s headmaster in order to get them ready to deliver the initial curriculum. LEAD is currently training some of their members to get ready to deliver the same kind of training to other migrants schools.

A special thank you goes to COPU for their support throughout the project and helping Greenboard and Dexxon to connect the dots.

So from now on the children of Wende school will be able to access the latest software and technology to become computer literate but also to improve their knowledge in general topics such as maths, English, geography, arts, problem solving, programming and much more.

The organizations involved will continue to build new curriculum, more exercise and will also get more teachers involved in the near future. One of the advantages of using a free software licensing model is that all the cost of such a solution only goes to the hardware and any school can just download, use and adapt the content to their needs. Hopefully we will soon see a strong teacher community improving this initial work and working together to create better free educational content for our children.

As a core member of Greenboard, we hosted an inauguration on 12th November at Wende School

We had people from Dexxon, Greenboard, Chinese OSS Promotion Union, LEAD, CSIP French Embassy, Beijing Normal University, Friends of New Citizens, Beijing LUG, Lemote, Wende School and other Migrant Schools!

Zhuang Xiuli, Professor at School of Educational Technology of Beijing Normal University will definitely bring a lot to the Greenboard education project helping to improve the teaching skills of Wende and other Migrant Schools teachers!

Class demonstration given by Wende teacher, students were very concentrated to learn how to paint with computer (even the room was full of visitors)

After 3 classes, primary students could paint something really amazing with Kolourpaint!

Teacher Training - Week 4

In Wende School Trial Part 1 and Part 2, I mainly introduced how we identified the school for trial, our preparation work and part of the training. In this post, I will cover the demonstration class that teachers give us and how efficient our training has been so far.

With the target of having the children use the Gdiums by November, we have been raising our teacher on-site training session to twice a week. Another part of the training should be done by the teachers themselves and we insisted that they take the Gdiums at home in order to get familiar with the machine and the system when they have free time.

Migrant Schools always run on very low budgets, making them nearly impossible to attract qualified teachers, buying updated textbooks and avoiding high turn-over in both teachers and learning population.  Talking to the English is was a great example of this, and bringing her the few educational applications we had (dictionary, text-to-speech, vocabulary learning exercises, with native speaker voices, etc) definitely made a great upgrade to her existing teaching arsenal. She is now hoping to use the Gdium classroom daily or as much as possible based on other teacher schedule. She gave us a copy of the textbooks she uses so we can incorporate the vocabulary and the prerecorded words into the software we’re using (LLN (Linux Letters and Numbers). And we’re glad to see her joining the teacher training classes once the (children) mid term examination is over (in 2 weeks).

Class Demonstration from Wende teacher

So 4 sessions into the teacher training it was now time to give them a little exam and see how they would be doing using the system with their students. We started off with 4 children, then 10 and then a full 20 children classroom. It was really exciting to see the classroom being used for its intended purpose: getting the children to learn maths, English and art without even noticing it! For most of them it was there first encounter with a computer, but this didn’t seem to slow them down at all. The teachers did really well as well and we should be starting teaching them content development to build upon and enhance the existing Open Educational Resources we have provided to start using the Gdiums in the classroom. In order to make the project more scalable, we are cooperating with organizations like LEAD and CSIP to have more trainers. If you are interested in this project, feel free to jump in!

Computer Room at Wende School - Before decoration

Welcome to part 2 of my early post written in October 2009 which is mainly about the school selection, the preparation work and training.

During the school summer holiday, we went back to Wende School a few times and discussed with the headmaster about the computer room decoration and set up. We look at things like:

• Class orientation (make it easy for teachers to monitor & manage)
• Server / computer for teacher
• Internet and Wifi network
• Electricity and cabling
• Hardware protection (avoid dust and direct sunlight to computers)
• Safety management (prevent kids from accessing the electricity sockets)
• Security and thief proofing (install bars on windows and locks on doors)

By mid August, we visited again to check on the decoration status. What impressed me is that the headmaster actually was renovating the school with his wife by themselves, I saw them sweating while painting the walls and building the fences of the kindergarten. We were however a bit disappointed on the computer lab renovation progress: nothing had started yes and it was still the same storage room that you can see on the photo above. So we could only review the room requirements, discussed about who would be receiving  the training and whether they had a candidate to become part time system admin to manage the lab. Headmaster Cui had already thought about it and suggested to select a few teachers who have been working by his side for a while with some computer knowledge. We didn’t want to train someone to see leaving the school within months (which is currently a generic problem of such schools for migrant workers kids). He of course included himself in the group so they can also manage knowledge transfer by themselves.

Donated 20 Gdiums to Wende School

Early September 2009, Dexxon / the Gdium Foundation donated 20 Gdiums to Wende School as initially agreed. We were very excited about the start! The room was almost ready. It was decorated with nice white paint (it’s a bit plain but we can always add some colorful drawing later), carpets, bars, locks and clean tables and chairs. Not enough electricity sockets were installed, so we had to add a few wire extensions and plugs. Of course there were still some sundries here and there but we were ready to start teachers training sessions. The same day, headmaster Cui provided a server and Wifi router for us to prepare and use in the newly installed lab.

Testing 20 Gdiums at Wende School Computer Lab

One week later the whole set up was ready and we could start training the four selected teachers.  In my opinion Mr. Cui did an excellent job by choosing people with a very diverse background: we have a young teacher who is very open to new things; the administration manager, a 40+ years old lady who is only familiar with Windows; a college student who was just hired as part-time system admin to manage the computer room, and himself.

After discussion with the headmaster and the teachers, we agreed to give 4 to 6 days of training depending on the progress. 4 hours per day with a break every hour. 1 training day per week so they have enough time to digest and practice what they have learned. We printed and binded 5 Greenboard Open Textbooks covering all the initial deployment courses, 1 for trainer and 4 for teachers. Seeing the 5 textbooks print out, I got the feeling that a milestone of the project had been reached. Of course this is only version 1.0 (beta) and we already have a roadmap for future versions to come. Besides since the courses are released under a Creative Commons license, anybody can just jump in, give their feedback and actively contribute.

Giving training to Wende School teachers

On the first day of training, Jason was the key trainer while I was the assistant trainer. Julien and Liantao were testing the server performance with 20 Gdiums. It was exciting to see the reaction and get feedback from the teachers! The student sys-admin and headmaster seems quite familiar with Gdium and its operating system already. I guess they took a bit of advance by taking them home and exploring all the options.

The young teacher (Miss Liu) was very eager to learn and excited to discover new things. the only slight resistance came from the administration manager who had to learn a different system, which is not what she has been using for the past years. At the beginning, she showed her frustration and asked a lot of questions about what’s the hardware performance and if Linux could do the same things as Windows. During each break, we spent some time to explain the benefits of Open Source in general and in education in particular. The last training session covering Gcompris education suite nailed it: we saw her trying out all the educational activities supplied by the suite, with a big smile and satisfaction on her face and she said:  “These games are good for children to learn Maths and English!”  Say no more! What’s better than experiencing it by herself?

As mentioned earlier, making schools understand the benefits of Open Source can be challenging, “Free” as Free beer doesn’t work as almost every software is free in China, we focus on “Free” as “Freedom” but how many people care about it? Most people have habits and are addicted to Microsoft software. It will definitely take some time to change. The good thing is that Open Source and Linux are not companies, we don’t have quarterly financial report to fulfill, that means we have time. By providing a total solution with education oriented customized Operating System for students / teachers / Server computers, a complete training courses / curriculum and constant maintenance support, it will definitely fasten the process. I look forward to seeing more school benefiting from it!

As this is an ongoing project, do expect to read more about our progress, experiences, and maybe difficulties right here!

Normal University FOSS Club - First initial meeting

The first time I met Bauer Yung, a Computer Science student from Beijing Normal University was at a Beijing Linux User Group meeting a few months ago he was attracted by the concept of Open Source. As the leader of College Open Source Society I encouraged him to start a FOSS Club in his college. We met again at the WiserU workshop and discussed a bit more in details.  In a similar manner as what we did when Jesse Zhang (Beihang University) wanted to start his FOSS Club following the GNOME.Asia Summit, I suggested to have a meeting together with FOSS clubs core members from other Beijing Universities.

After some miscommunication about the meeting arrangement we finally ended up with a date conflicting with the Beijing GNOME User Group preventing some members to join. The good thing is that it gave us the first opportunity to share experiences about scheduling, meeting arrangement and locations.

The whole meeting went very well, there were about 10 students from Normal University and about the same numbers from Beihang University and USTB joined, as well as myself and Fred. Bauer wrote a very detailed meeting notes (in Chinese) which can be accessed here.

Basically everybody shared their views and perspectives about:

• What’s the purpose of the FOSS club
• What it takes to start (mailing list, website and regular meeting time / venue)
• What are the tasks of each core members
• How to promote the group
• What are the challenges, problems and their solutions

As a leader of Techgirls Group, I noticed and couldn’t help talking with one of the core members girlfriend, Qingning, English student in Beijing Normal University. She had of course heard a bit about Open Source (through her boyfriend) and even tried Open Solaris which turned out a bit difficult for a beginner so she gave up. She couldn’t understand why people are contributing to Open Source, and even more her boyfriend. Her concerns were mainly around the business model and opportunities as she wouldn’t want him wasting time on something that cannot help them make a living. Hence, Fred and I spent quite some time explaining her the software industry landscape in China where people do not pay for license and all the major online companies IT infrastructures run Linux and Open Source technologies. Finaly she said she’ll give another try and must be using Linux now! I strongly believe Qingning will be a great asset for the newly launched BNU OSS Club, especially for meetings and events organization and building awareness. What’s better than non-geeks like Qingning to talk to people like herself about Linux?

Introduced by the LEAD organization in early 2009, we have been going to numerous Migrant Workers’ Children Schools especially in ChaoYang district to give training to teachers and headmasters about computers, Open Source and Open Education in schools. For most of them, it’s the first time for them to hear about Open Source and Open Education.

A few months ago, we had a chance to go to Wende School and met the headmaster and all the teachers over there on a Saturday morning. After the training, they asked a lot of questions and I got a very good impression about the school as they are very interested by the concepts we promoted.

Schoolwise, it is similar to a lot of other Migrant schools here in China. Many of the schools exist in conditions of absolute poverty and lack qualified teachers or administrators. They have very scarce equipment as well. Wende school has about 250 students (aged 6 to 12), 15 teachers and 10 classrooms without any laboratory, computer classroom or library. Wherever this is true, it remains unlikely that migrant children will receive an adequate education.

A picture with the headmaster of Wende Migrant School, Mr. Cui

Unlike other headmasters I have met so far in other Migrant schools, most of them are
migrant workers themselves, they are usually some individuals taking opportunity to profit from a huge potential market due to the increased demand from migrant workers for education. Hence they would only see computers as tools to recruit more students for their schools without caring so much about the education side of the whole thing.  They tend to have some second hand unusable computers to put in a room as display. However, Mr. Cui, Headmaster of Wende, previously worked as System Administrator taking care of computers and networks in companies. He is very open minded and understands that the benefits of introducing computers to kids not only for the sake of just learning how to use computers, but to use them as tools to solve problems and widen the scope to other educational domains as well.

Since then, we went back to Wende School a few times to discuss about their needs, sponsoring some Gdiums and developing a computer lab. Of course by doing so, it would involve a lot of preparation like:

• Decoration and set up of the room with computers
• Completion of the Operating System for computers and server
• Training materials for teachers
• Training schedule for the teachers and system admin
• Who would be receiving the training
• Who would be the system administrator
• Maintenance and support, etc.

Ones of the weaknesses of Open Source in Education is lack of knowledge of Open Source from teachers and lack of documentation (especially in Chinese). Microsoft is perceived as “free” software here and all the public exams are based on Microsoft software in China while  their strategy is to give away textbooks to poor schools to make sure their market domination remains.

In order to have schools understand Open Source, we spent about 6 months to talk with schools and teachers to deliver a solution that covers their IT teaching needs but also Maths, Geography, English, Chinese, Art, Music, Typing, Office Suite, Internet and so on. Based on those requirements, we customized G-Linux and built a classroom server using applications like Gcompris, Rur-ple,  K-Geography, Stardict, OpenOffice.org, etc.. We also built  the training materials (in Chinese) and finally published our first release of Greenboard Open Textbook. All the contents is freely available on the Greenboard wiki pages and licensed under Creative Commons. Here I would like to thank the whole team including Julien Forgeat, Jason Wu, Frederic Muller, Helen Wang, SunLianTao and SunLiWen who have been constantly contributing to this meaningful project!

This article is getting too long to read so I will stop it here for now! In part two, I will talk about the installation / set up of the computer lab and training. In this trial, I hope that we can all learn together whether they are problems or useful tricks. Looking forward to the success in bringing computers with Linux and Open Source Software to Migrant schools in China.