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.
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. 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.
In 2021, the development of AlekSIS has progressed strongly, so that we will now test AlekSIS in practice with partner schools. Gathering feedback will be an important task for us in 2022 in order to be able to fulfil the goal of using AlekSIS on a large scale in schools.