AlkisGeorgopoulos

Revision 7 as of 2010-01-16 07:57:39

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About Me

Launchpad ID:

alkisg

IRC:

alkisg on irc.freenode.net

Email:

<alkisg AT SPAMFREE gmail DOT com>

Ubuntu Member:

2006-05-23

Home page:

http://users.sch.gr/alkisg/ (in Greek)

I am a computer engineer, appointed since 2000 as a secondary school teacher in Ioannina, Greece. I've been teaching a broad range of subjects, from educational software and simple office applications to system administration, networking and programming. I got a Pedagogic Degree in 2000, an MSc in Informatics in 2004 and I'm currently a Ph.D. candidate. I've been a speaker in a lot of conferences and attended many informatics and education-related courses and seminars. I'm the developer of some Greek educational applications and the co-author of a secondary school educational activities package. Lately I've been focused to spreading FLOSS to Greek schools.

Interest in Open Source

Unfortunately I've "wasted" more than fifteen years in being involved with proprietary frameworks; from making TSR programs in assembly back in the DOS days to creating educational apps with Delphi, Visual C++ and WinAPI. Also, in the first years I've been using proprietary software in my classrooms almost exclusively; with little reason other than the "I'm using this program because all teachers are using this program". As time passed I got sick of having to pay for programs that I wouldn't use except for teaching them; and having my students resort to piracy because they couldn't afford them. Fortunately, I was given the chance to completely switch to open source by a ministry pilot program: I got selected to be among the first teachers to try out LTSP in our school labs. The first months were hard, but interesting; now, two years later, me and my students are much more productive using 100% free software than we were before switching to FLOSS.
So I'm currently interested in finding the best methods to setup, administer and of course use Ubuntu in school classrooms (both with and without LTSP), and improving it however I can.

Giving back to the community

Plans

As much as my current experience permits, I'd like to shift my focus a little towards upstream development.

  • I'm writing a set of ltsp-build-client plugins to be used for automated installation of fat client chroots in school labs. Basically this means that the teacher should be able to run a script, return after a few hours, and find the computer lab ready for use.

  • I'd like to develop a class manager, with which the teacher would be able to select a student or the members of a class, and invoke an action for them: send or collect files, set/reset some gnome or firefox settings (e.g. add a panel applet or a firefox bookmark) etc.
  • I'd like to develop a program that projects the teacher screen or a specific window to all students, using multicasting so that even video could be broadcasted on 100mbps networks.


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