edubuntu provides an opportunity for addressing this issue - by providing a set of opensource tools for lesson planning, scheduling, grading, and classroom use edubuntu is has an opportunity to establish (or contribute to) a shared database of teaching resources.
if teachers could elect to participate in such a database, edubuntu could transparently (or on a per-document basis) submit all lesson plans, class schedules, tests, activities, etc to a publicly available and searchable database. i'm not particularly familiar with the software included in edubuntu, but if there were a way of tagging documents with the relevant subject matter, age/grade level, topic, class name, etc - it would not take very long before a massive database of teaching materials was created.
i'm thinking of something along the lines of wikipedia for teaching materials. it would allow teachers to spend less time re-inventing the wheel and more time building upon the work of others or investigating alternate approaches to teaching. many subjects are essentially standardized - it's an incredible waste of human resources for each teacher everywhere in the world to design a curriculum to teach the same thing - especially when the curricula produced are often almost identical.
i don't know if this is something edubuntu would be interested in supporting - i had the idea talking to my wife a few days ago and thought i'd pass it along in case you guys were interested.
-- edubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-devel
