LibreOffice For Schools

Is anyone interested in creating a LibreOffice for Education Text Book project?

This can and probably should be setup as its own working group.

The California Open Source Textbook Project http://www.opensourcetext.org/
Is currently seeking Open Source Text Books for The California Public Schools
K-12. They require the material to be presented in a Text Book style. This
would be a good way to get LibreOffice into Word Processing Classes in
California High Schools as well as schools around the world.

College Open Text Book http://www.collegeopentextbooks.org/ Is also seeking
Text Books for use in Colleges, This would be a good opportunity to get
LibreOffice into College's across the US!

Open Text Book Library is another College Initiative
http://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/ as well.

There are quite a few more of these organizations that partnerships could be
established with as well.

I have been seeing a number for these popping up and I have seen some that
will pay $20,000 USD for Creative Commons Text Book Donations late last year
which could be used to help fund the this working group. Community developed
software with educational community developed Course-ware would work out
pretty well.

These initiatives would require producing a full text book with exercises etc.

As The LibreOffice Software already has an unbeatable low cost all we are
missing to take over the education sector is unbeatable low cost course-ware
to go with it.

Establishing a full LibreOffice For Education program with the goals of not only
producing the text books but also full courses and possibly Moodle course
ware, Produced courses could even potentially be made available at edX
https://www.edx.org/ (Which has a Free Into To Linux Course this year for
those who have not registered for it yet.) It is a $2,400 course normally
taught by The Linux Foundation.

Tim

The subject is indeed very important and TDF should pay serious
attention toward this.
Situation in many countries are heavely influenced by MS lobbyists.
Fortunately the K-12 curriculum in Lithuania's state education system
is open to software alternatives. I know personally few teachers
(including myself) which has choosen LibreOffice as an office
applications teaching base.
10 years ago even a paper text book was published in Lithuania
containing explanations and examples with MS Office and OpenOffice in
parallel. Now sadly it is in significant part outdated and currently
we have no full range replacement.
The situation could be comparable in other European countries and
maybe wider in the world.

Such thoughts so far.

Antanas Budriūnas

I have only found one commercial publication that is mostly directly geared to
LibreOffice in the USA It is a getting started guide for migrating to OpenOffice
but also includes LibreOffice content.

Currently many US State ran school systems are moving to open text books
published as Creative Commons so their is a great opportunity. Some US schools
have ousted Microsoft due to cost constraints, some have been migrating to
Google for Education services and Chromebooks.

I have a cousin that teaches Business Finance Accounting, Computer Classes and
Math for a PA state high school. I sent him and email to find out what they are
using. Some schools in the US I know are still using old versions of Word
Perfect for Word processing classes.

Even if the schools are using Chromebooks they can easily use LibreOffice
through VNC.

I know their is one commercial provider of a web based LibreOffice on the
internet that works with Google Chromebooks but it is an older version and is
a paid service after a small try for free period. Has their been any official
push of a Document Foundation LibreOffice Web project? It would also be a good
time to start this as well as Microsoft , Google etc have web based office
offerings on the market already.

IMO for this we really, seriously, need at least one experienced
instructional designer or trainer to lead (coordinate) the effort, or
someone experienced in producing quality textbooks or training
materials aimed at whatever educational level is the target market.

--Jean