“Tell me and I will forget, show me and I may not remember, involve me and I will understand”

Native American Proverb

Learning through participation with the OpenOffice.org Community

WWW.theINGOTs.org

International Grades in Office Technology

Programme for this presentation

What are INGOTs? - Overview

Why are INGOTs important to the OpenOffice.org community?

Some more detail about INGOTs?

Current status.

Questions

INGOT overview

International Grades in Office Technology are certificates that

recognise basic skills in Office Technology not tied to any

particular Office software

The Gold certificate requires the student to make a useful

25 hour contribution to the OpenOffice.org project

The Silver certificate requires the student to download an

ISO image of a software application, burn a CD and give it

to someone who needs it

Why are INGOTs important to the OpenOffice.org Community?

1.	They provide a global business model that can be used to generate income to finance development

2. They ensure that young children learn about FLOSS and how to take part in a FLOSS project

4.	Additional contributions to the project will come from the students doing the Gold INGOT

5.	Some students will gain a real interest and become developers

6.	They provide a vehicle for raising awareness of the OpenOffice.org brand.

Supporting the community

Desirable characteristics of a new business to support FLOSS

It has to be financially viable and self-sustaining

It has to be directly relevant to supporting FLOSS

Globally scalable and manageable with low initial financial investment

theINGOTs.org

The Bronze INGOT

Entry level certification suitable for complete beginners whether 7 or 70.

Low barrier to entry to promote inclusion

Reward after relatively short period to encourage further participation.

No spreadsheets to ensure mathematical attainment is not at this point a limiting factor.

Bronze INGOT example criterion

I use the SHIFT key and Caps Lock appropriately.

Word processing

Its quite common for beginners to use the caps lock to switch between upper and lower case for, say, the start of a sentence. Ensure that they use two hands holding down the shift key and pressing and releasing the appropriate key to type a capital letter. The Caps Lock should be used rarely, only when there is some extensive text, all in capitals.

Guidance on interpreting this criterion

General Knowledge

The general knowledge section could be difficult for young children or those with special needs. Its sufficient for the Bronze to have discussed the issues and at least awakened some understanding of these. Don't withhold a certificate from a pupil who has demonstrated all the practical skills but after some genuine efforts has difficulties with the general knowledge. There is plenty of time to develop this with the Silver later but we do want to make a start.

I know that some programs are free to be copied and distributed while others have copyright that limits distribution

Silver INGOT

The Silver INGOT builds on the Bronze and has been

designed to be compatible with the UK KS3 (ages 11-14)

National ICT Strategy. In fact, this is reasonably generic and

so it should not cause any international problems.

The main difference in structure compared to the Bronze

is the tasks section

3 Tasks are required:

A community task

Building a 5 page web site

Preparing an office circular.

Community Task

The community task requires the candidate to download a

CD-ROM image and burn a CD-ROM for the benefit of others.

The reasoning here is to teach the pupils how to obtain useful

and free software resources from the Internet and to motivate

them by making their activity practically useful to others.

http://distribution.openoffice.org/cdrom

The address above is a mirror site for obtaining the

OpenOffice.org ISO image. When burnt to a CD-ROM, the

CD-ROM is then an installation disc for the OpenOffice.org

software.

Candidates should burn a disc and give it to someone

who needs the software but can't easily get it.

Designing the Office Web Site

This is simply a matter of designing a web site with 5

linked pages

This should be done with a recognised web program

such as Mozilla Composer or the HTML editor in

OpenOffice.org

The web site should be tested with 3 different web

browsers to be reasonably sure it conforms to open

standards.

Designing an office circular

This is a simple DTP exercise

It can be carried out in any page layout software

The candidates own designs should be used rather

than reliance on Wizards, Druids and pre-defined

templates. Children learn by designing not copying

other people's work.

The Gold INGOT

The Gold INGOT follows on from the Bronze and Silver as

far as software skills are concerned

The Gold INGOT takes the community service element

much further and requires 25 hours of work on an aspect

of the OpenOffice.org project.

This should be useful to the project and suit the interests

of the candidate.

Complexity is less important than the contribution being

useful

Examples of OpenOffice.org coursework

Raise money and burn many more CD-ROMs for distribution.

Help on the OpenOffice.org users list

Provide support for users locally

Provide some teaching materials for an aspect of the

curriculum in OpenOffice.org Impress

Provide clip art on a subject theme eg science apparatus

Contribute artwork for the OpenOffice.org web site

Design additional templates

Here is an example of how pupils might make a contribution

Measuring Angles

Estimate the size of these angles and decide whether they

are:

A

B

C

66˚

Acute

Reflex

Obtuse

290˚

107˚

Acute?

Obtuse?

Reflex?

Angle <90˚

Angle >180˚

90˚ < Angle <180˚

Bearings

You need to know that the bearing of a point A from an observer O is the

angle between the line OA and the North line through O,

measured in a clockwise direction.

A

N

N

O

30°

210°

Clockwise – the direction that

the hands move on a clock

In the diagram the bearing of A from O is 210°. The three-figure bearing of O from A is 030°.

Bearings Continued

A ship travels on a bearing of 120° for 100 sea miles, then on a

bearing of 230° for a further 200 sea miles. Represent this

with a scale drawing. What is the ship's distance and bearing

from the starting point?

120°

100 sea miles

230°

200 sea miles

Start

Finish

Estimate the distance first.

Is it bigger than 100 sm?

Is it less than 200 sm?

North

Supporting pupils' course work

Help can be obtained by subscribing to the OpenOffice.org education list

Send a blank E-mail to :

educ-subscribe@marketing.openoffice.org

You will get a return asking for confirmation. Send this back then mail the list introducing yourself and ask a question.

Others will reply and tell you where to find the things you need.

INGOT Academies

INGOT Academies are schools or organisations that have an organisation wide interest in INGOT certification

INGOT Academies enjoy a greater degree of autonomy than schools with individual assessors.

INGOT Academies will provide assessment training for assessors in local schools, and will be able to award an unlimited number of certificates within the domain in which they operate.

INGOT Academies will be centres of excellence for the INGOTs.org programme

Costs

The following fees are levied in the UK. They can be adjusted to fit the local economy.

Bronze certificate	£2.00

Silver certificate	£2.50

Gold certificate	£3.00

Assessor annual fee £10

INGOT Academies in the UK pay an annual fee for unlimited certification

Web site and basic certification support in place, imminent complete redesign to meet EU standards and to support E-commerce and multiple languages

Since the September launch, 50 UK schools are either doing INGOTs or have them built into their official development plans on which their funding depends on meeting targets

Poland is the next most highly developed market with approximately 40 assessors being trained.

There are trained assessors in UK, Serbia/Montenegro, Poland, Slovenia, New Zealand, Venezeula, California, North Carolina, Kentucky and Texas. Soon Czech Republic, Romania and Australia.

Current Status

2004-06-15T17:39:45