Localized (বাংলা) version of kgeo presentation :)

I finally finished up the bangla version of my kgeography presentation “চলো আমরা ভারতবর্ষের ম্যাপ এ্যাড করি…”. Download it from here.

Please put up any comments or suggestions for improvement (including বানান ভূল/spelling mistakes also)

Crosslink: The english version “Add maps into kgeography”

KDE4 released!!

Folks mark this date ” The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era.” Read more…

Take the visual guide:

Feedback wanted on the activity oriented approach in Bijra project

Now, the students and teachers alike are increasingly and critically using FOSS elements/softwares as an aide or learning tools at our LTSP powerhouse in Bijra. Specifically, KDE Edutainment package, project gutenburg etc. are practical examples of such aides. The students use KBruch to do mental maths, KGeography to brush up their geography and simultaneously these made the teachers’ life lot easier.

But there is a problem. There are **no** maps of India in the kgeography, let apart the state & city maps. Now, in simple terms, a techie geek in general needs no geography but the students need to learn the same. So a typical solution would be a geeky write-up how to add maps adapted from the KGeography Handbook for their aid. Initially, I even made such an attempt: Insight into KGeography. As Indranil Dasgupta posted, “It was fairly good! And it was also just plain WRONG! If we wanted the experiment to get the geography and history and language and science teachers to collaborate, really scale, then we needed to speak in THEIR terms, and NOT speak __to__ them in our language.”

So following the pedagogy in OLPC which housed a collaborative activity-oriented approach, we tried an “activity oriented approach“. So, instead of talking tech to a geography teacher regarding XML layouts and all, we can actually discuss with them in terms of drawing maps, colouring them, adding them and creating questions and interactive activities around the maps with which they are already familiar with. Well, in this case I re-made the entire stuff and ended up with a sort of draft presentation “Lets’ add the map of India in KGeography“.

The whole idea is to present the tech thingy in a more structured, focussed and digestable format to get the much needed things done. Thus this activity oriented approach has double advantages, the students not only gets to learn much more about their subjects using FOSS elements but also gets to know the technical aspects. Also ultimately in this way we get a far bigger community todo more n’ more stuffs!!

So please put up your comments, suggestions for improvements regarding
this and brickbats if any

Photo set: Bijra High School Project

Add the map of India into kgeography…

As a follow-up of my last post Insight into KGeography, I would like to publish the completed release of my presentation regarding “lets’ add the map of India in kgeography”. Download it from here. Also, do post any comments or suggestions for improvements.

Have fun!! And HAPPY NEW YEAR 2008

Update: Here’s the first cut of the bangla (বাংলা) version of this presentation. Though its’ still half-complete, have a look. Will post the completed version soon. Download it from here. Also, post much needed comments & scope of improvements.

Btw, had some rough times with openoffice. The theme which i used in the original presentation won’t render bangla fonts. So, i had to recreate lot of thing all over.