KDE for students

Last week Albert and I made a couple of talks related to KDE on the Térmens Lan Party event. One of these talks was about KDE-Edu. We reviewed every application one by one, showing some of their strengths.

There was a teacher in the audience (who is concerned about free software, afaik), he said that he was trying to get to use gnu/linux on his school but that he was facing some problems when it comes to use KDE.

One of the issues he mentioned (and that I don’t really know about) is the lack of accessibility tools, the other one is that KDE-Edu applications don’t really fit teachers needs.

It is this second point the one that I would like to focus now. We have quite good applications, but we developers (despite the ones that are both developers and teachers, of course) do what we ponder that’s useful, but not what it is in the actual classroom, so I just wanted to point out that we are open to requests, or at least I am.

In this direction, I wanted to mention that someone contacted me since he wanted to see some features happening on KAlgebra because of some study he is doing. I’m just mentioning that because it was a feature that I was not intending to add in a near future but that can indeed be useful in a real scenario, and it is implemented and hopefully will be in for KDE 4. Here you can see a screenshot of it and you can download and try it here if you wish, even if it is not ready still.

In conclusion, I just wanted to say that if you miss anything, just ask for it. If you don’t know what we have, just check all the (maybe too little) information we’re offering and if you want to contribute but you don’t feel like coding, you can help to improve this communication channel, that is actually failing, so that this education software reaches its goal, students.