Public Primary School Rosa Boekdrukker
The School
The public primary school Rosa Boekdrukker in Amsterdam is probably the only primary school in the Netherlands that develops OSS/GPL educational software. We made a CMS and a client-server system, both for primary education. Please see links below.
Our school can take part in a broadband fiber school network experiment that is being carried out in Amsterdam. In the coming years all schools in Amsterdam will have fiber broadband connections to the Internet and a 1Gb fiber broadband LAN with the schools under one board. We want to experiment with audio and video on the network
Why Elphel?
Our School tries to do as much as possible with Open Source because we think that's what education is about: sharing knowledge. In that sense we became interested in the Elphel camera. It's OSS/GPL, even the hardware! And it gives high resolution output. In our opinion, using a broadband connetion and connecting a cheap low-level webcam and a carbon :) mic to it is stupid. As a microphone we use a Sennheiser MD421. In this way we hope the enduser benefits as much as possible from the fiber network.
Usage (technical)
We will use the camera in our schools LAN, either hand held or on a tripod. Maybe we can build a portable camera. Our volunteer developed cameras for psychiatric and educational use in the days of the b/w vidicons.
Usage (content)
We have several ideas on the usage of cameras and sound over fiber broadband which we want to investigate. Among them are: giving parents access to classrooms during lessons over Internet, online classroom access for children ill at home, public lessons over the Internet, using the school unstaffed by others, children creating podcasts as project research documentation, to name a few.
