Welcome to the schul-frei stand!

Schul-frei logo
Teckids e.V. is a German association which provides a legal frame for three technological projects. We manage the project called schul-frei, which aims to bring digitisation with free software to schools. We especially value the participation of youth in these projects, because they are the people which are affected by digitisation the most. Our educational concept is also based around the idea that young people should be judged by their abilities, not by age. They should learn to take responsibility and be independent. An example is the AlekSIS project. It is (mostly) developed by adolescents from Teckids e.V. and from the school Katharineum zu Luebeck, where it is actively used. AlekSIS is a web based school information system which can be used to manage and publish organisational subjects of educational institutions. It is also part of the schul-frei canon and uses the EUPL. We also present and provide support for solutions such as Moodle or BigBlueButton for E-Learning and debianedu/skolelinux with Nextcloud for school networks on our website https://schul-frei.org/en/index.html We set up comprehensive platforms for schools, education and youth institutions in time for the increased demand for online teaching. This has contributed to the fact that more education providers are interested in these solutions and that the various projects are gaining in reach.

schul-frei @ FOSDEM

Besides the classic arguments for free software, there are many more for free software in education. For one thing, schools are independent of companies if they use FOSS for their educational purposes. However, it should not be forgotten that closed software often discriminates against children and young people because of their age. Therefore, it is necessary to clearly demonstrate the advantages of FOSS to educational institutions. We are currently doing this by presenting free solutions in a bundle. In doing so, we have to offer educational establishments a solution that can compete with solutions from large companies. At our stand you can find out what our concept looks like in concrete terms and how you can support our project. We depend on the help of people who join us , with their experience or ideas, in the goal of being able to offer schools a good free alternative. As all our project work is open, everyone is invited to ask us questions and discuss ideas at the stand. Anyone who might even work in an educational institution themselves or know relevant people who will learn first-hand at our stand how they can use free solutions in a school.

schul-frei in 2021

Since our last FOSDEM, some things have changed in part due to the corona pandemic. School closures related to the pandemic have meant that we have received many requests to use video conferencing solutions. This was an advantage for us in that we probably became a bit better known during the school closures. Due to the high demand for video conferencing software, BigBlueButton was added to our software canon. BigBlueButton in combination with moodle could inspire many schools, which could either use a public instance of our association or got their own instance installed by us. Apart from social distancing, fundamental things in our project work have also changed. Now we are more open for external help and cooperation. Now all our projects were publicly visible at any time, but now we have a public chatroom where everyone can talk about our project. There everyone can contribute ideas, ask questions or just follow the project work. We hope that by opening the project to external people, our project will become more transparent and diverse. Hopefully, this will contribute over the future to making the actual goal of making free software popular in schools more tangible. One plan for the future is to add a new video conferencing solution to our canon that combines various free software components, which is called Meet.in.One. All the advantages of several conference tools should be combined in one solution. This bridge between the different solutions should of course be free and developed together with Teckids e.V. and other developers.