In this essay I explore how a teacher can apply some ideas from the free software movement in a classroom environment.

Introduction

Teachers, like all people, should strive to spend the minimum amount of time behind a computer screen necessary to do their work well. Genuine human connection is the most powerful tool the teacher has to effect change, and the systems used behind the scenes to achieve this are secondary. Free software is useful in a limited and conscientious way to reduce time formatting documents, composing reports, researching, corresponding with parents and faculty, and exchanging or retrieving documents.

Free software is an alternative to the AI assistant, which, it may be argued, achieves many of the same objectives without the hastle of learning the programs I refer to. However, the AI assistant, like all proprietary software, introduces several obstacles. The foremost is data privacy: is the user really sure that their data is secure? There are also the countless ethical, political, and environmental problems surrounding AI, that I will not go into here. The linux classroom as a significant alternative to the AI classroom because it is less dependent on external systems, and sets an example to the students of what data independence looks like. The teacher should use the materials available to create a relevant curriculum (see my essay Education), and the teacher who uses free software has more freedom handling the materials than one who is reliant on AI.

The examples I use to illustrate the linux classroom are speculative, and are intended to give a sense for how the functionality may come across to students and the school community.

Templates

The teacher who is developing their own curriculum (see the other essay) will spend a significant amount of prep time preparing documents for students, parents, and faculty. For classroom use, they need research outlines, essay topic outlines, sentence starters, etc. For faculty, they may write meeting agendas and so forth, and for parents and faculty they write emails. As such, in alignment with the free software philosophy, these mundane tasks should be as effortless and simple as possible. Through Emacs, which is a plain-text editor, The linux teacher makes use of several document templates, that are generated at a seperate step from planning or writing. This means the teacher can focus more on content at a seperate step from formatting, and then import the text into the document template with a few short keyboard commands. These templates can be created at the beginning of the year and reused year to year. By using LaTeX formatting (link and format the logo), the requirements for creating a new rubric or handout is a matter of typing out the information and hitting a keyboard command, and then it is formatted, with approrpiate topic headers, criteria, line spacing, etc., ready for printing. The teacher does not have to “fiddle” with templates throughout the year, but they are already have a selection they can draw from.

Freeing up the labor of creating handouts, agendas, and documents of all kinds may allow the teacher to be more creative and devote more time to the brainstorming part of lesson planning.

Weekly/biweekly/monthly email

One application of the template is in the weekly or biweekly email to families. This is the report that many parents delight in, but (some) teachers dread. Writing a personalized email home that covers everything you did that week, or month, can be a several hour project, with very little payoff (how many parents are reading these?). Composition of the email for the linux teacher is integrated into the teacher’s journal. The teacher logs notes and reflections each day through the class calendar, so that these reflections along with the objectives for that day or week can be imported directly into an email under neatly formatted headers and bullets, edited and added to, and emailed directly to families (no need to copy and paste into an email program, if the teacher’s email manager is within emacs). They may even use a template with a prewritten introduction and conclusion, and adjust some of the adjectives used, to remain true to how the week/month went. Additional notes, if the teacher has handwritten reflections, may be added here and there to fill out the email, illustrating let’s say a particularly inspiring moment of discovery or collaboration. From directly importing the class calendar’s weekly topics as headers, with a choice words and examples added, the weekly email, through the journal and email template, produces itself. The end result is an organized report that just needs to be edited and refined rather than written from scratch. A several hour endeavor, fraught with reflection, ommission, revision (of which likely no one will take notice), becomes an effortless and regular fixture of teacher to household correspondence. It’s predictability becomes a utility rather than a chore.

Website

The class website is a private domain to access missed assignments, or extra credit (easily generated from the templates used for classroom use) in a downloadable PDF format. If a student needs extra practice or review in something, the teacher may recommend parents retrieve assignments from that source. What the class website is NOT is a social media platform for private student data or published work.

A student is on a family trip to see their grandparents in Minnesota for two weeks. The teacher emails the parents a HTML link to the website with all the relevant assignments for that week. Another student is out sick, so the teacher emails the same link: no need to hunt through their desktop looking for the files.

Web-content: procedurally generated assignments

In addition to missed classroom content, the website also contains proceduraly generated assignments are for “drill” work. This may include multiplication worksheets, word problems, math puzzles, etc, all with randomized number values, randomly selected names, and so on.

All “web content” is strictly supplemental and accessed by adults. Students are never required to log on themselves, but are welcome to if they have parent permission and are curious.

The classroom ‘assistant’

All of the class resources, especially the website, may be hosted locally on a server, either using a raspberry pi or similar machine. It lives in a visible place in the classroom, let’s say at or next to the teacher’s desk). It may have a name, either given by the teacher or the students. Perhaps it is named “Og¹.” It is no secret that Og assists the teacher, since students see the effects of Og’s contribution in daily classroom life.

A student makes a comment about the font used in one of the handouts, and the teacher humbly passes the compliment on to the ‘assistant.’

Moreover, it demonstrates how the virtual can be localized²; this extends to the whole world of computing, when the students realize the following: if their teacher’s computer connects to the ‘classroom assistant’ to do certain kinds of work, then their parents must be using some similar connection at home if and when they connect to their own work through the internet. But to what? And where? That is the kind of questioning and thinking that is raised by having a localized computing assistant.

C.S. club

It is easy to imagine, with the willingness of the teacher, this functionality extending beyond the classroom and into the school community.

Some middle schoolers hear about the ’new teacher’ whose classroom assistant is a linux machine, and during lunch, come and see how it works. The teacher gladly pulls out the projector and shows them around the scripts and configuration files he uses to create templates and host the website. The middle schoolers show an interest, so the teacher offers to open a partition³ on the machine that they can remote connect to with their laptops, and tinker with some of the code as they like. The students return weekly and spread the word, and soon there is enough interest to form a CS club. The students get into the rhythm of writing code and documentation, using a local mailserver to send messages and write text-based RPGs. The teacher of course maintains admin privileges, and can see their messages and files. Before long, the CS club is developed enough that the school and faculty agree to purchase a server for dedicated use by the club.

Clearly the computer is more than a utility in our lives. It is also cultural. Whether we create a culture around it, or we let it shape the way culture exists around us, that is our choice. The linux teacher makes the choice to implement computing in a consciencious, free way, to improve lesson planning and home communication. They are also diligently aware of the ethical questions underlying all such implementation, and work to promote awareness of this by their actions.

Conclusion

While this essay does not go into detail exactly regarding how to do everything described, it nevertheless shows how free software can be applied in the classroom, to decrease the stress caused from using digital systems, so that computers can actually serve us. This is the achievement of the free software movement: to create tools capable of allowing us to live more free and independent lives.