Drumbeat/K-12 Drumbeat

Title

K-12 Drumbeat

Headline

Helping students and teachers in secondary education to contribute to making the web more open, and learn something along the way.

Short Description

• Provide a focal point for Mozilla community members who want to improve K-12 education and help them promote their projects.
• Start to build a community of K-12 teachers and technologists who see the value in free and open source software and the Open Web.
• Make K-12 teachers and curriculum directors aware of add-ons to Firefox that help K-12 teachers and students make better use of the web.
• Make K-12 technology directors and IT Staff aware of the security risks of older browsers, and help overcome significant obstacles that prevent them from migrating to modern browsers.
• Identify and promote tools that help school district IT staff deploy and manage Firefox and other Mozilla products on school networks.
• Reinforce the importance of a free and open web by making the case to history, civics, and social studies teachers that over the next 100 years freedom of speech may be at risk if the web does not remain free and open.
• Raise awareness of HTML5/CSS3 to encourage replacing the ubiquitous use of Adobe Flash in K-12 education with more open solutions.

How does This Make the Web Better?

• Promote awareness of Open Web issues in the next generation of internet users.
• Make the Open Web more useful for teachers and students.
• Make the web safer by offering alternatives to IE6 in K-12 School Districts.

Tags

education, k-12, edtech, open web, firefox, jetpack, curriculum, standards

Participants:

• Richard Milewski
• Trevor McGarrah
• Trad Robinson

Goals

• To increase teacher, student & administrator awareness of the importance of an Open Web.
• To drive increased use of Mozilla projects in K-12 schools.
• To improve the security of the web by reducing the number of infected machines in K-12 schools.
• To give teachers and students web-based tools that improve academic performance.

Challenges

• Enterprise deployment and management tools for Firefox are few and far between.
• Proprietary software vendors have large sales forces who engage school district decision makers on a daily basis to drive the sale of proprietary software to K12 school districts.

Audience

• Mozilla Community Members Interested in Education
• K-12 Teachers
• School District Assistant Superintendents for Technology
• School District Technology Directors
• School District Assistant Superintendents for Curriculum
• School District Curriculum Directors
• University Schools of Education
• National and State/Provincial Departments of Education

Related Projects

• Ira Socol's efforts to create Firefox versions for use in K-12 Special Ed. with BYOB and Collections
• JetPack for Learning Design Challenge Second Round Entries include:
  • Studytroll - Quiz generator
  • LineHive.com - "Linkliography" generator
  • YupGrade - Jetpack for Plopquiz
  • Check Republic - Information Literacy Jetpack
  • ClozeFox - Gap exercise generator
  • Educational Facilita Multi-faceted web page analysis
  • Ho(o)ver Note - Book-like annotations in Firefox
  • Net Detective - Game to reinforce web utilization skills
  • Cohere - Jetpack to support Open University's Cohere project
  • Rubrick - Jetpack for browser-based assessment
  • Mupple - Mash-up PLE Jetpack
  • [1] - Jetpack for Moodle automation
  • Langladder - Jetpack for language learning

• Curiosity Clubhouse an experiment in enabling pre-reading kindergartners to use the web for learning. The next step in this project is to explore implementing the concepts as a Jetpack.

Background

Just in the U.S. there are about 55 million K-12 students in more than 16,000 school districts. District IT decisions are almost always made at the district level.

One effect of the Microsoft Anti-Trust Settlement is that many district administrators see the Microsoft voucher money as an indication of Microsoft's commitment to education rather than as a penalty for not playing well with others in the past.

In New York City schools alone, there are about 500,000 computers on school LANs. Schools keep computers in service longer than businesses. Estimates are that 20% of the computers in the New York City system are not capable of running versions of Internet Explorer later than IE 6. Firefox 3.x can run on most of these machines.

There are projects at Michigan State University to extend Firefox for use in K-12 special education.

The Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge will result in a number of Jetpack add-ins that will be of value to K-12 schools and teachers.