The first of three free seminars organised by LibreUmbria – the organisation promoting free and open source software in Italy’s Umbria region – aimed at parents and teachers is being organised at the Giovanni Cena primary school in Perugia at 3.30 pm on Monday 10th March, the LibreUmbria blog reports.
For some months the LibreUmbria working group has been making contact with a number of Umbrian schools in order to take free software into classrooms. They wish to start with primary schools where it is easy to raise children on open source (and there’s some great free and open source education software available at primary level. Ed). LibreUmbria’s wave of training is being heralded in with the arrival of spring thanks to collaboration with Perugia’s Terzo Circolo Didattico, which helped get this LibreUmbria experiment off the ground.
The LibreUmbria@Scuola programme will include three seminars on the subjects of awareness, freedom and security. Each word will address one aspect of new technology and open up a debate with attendees.
The seminars will be followed by two courses on the LibreOffice productivity suite in multimedia classrooms: one aimed at parents and another at teachers, who will in turn act as mentors and recommend them to colleagues and then to children in accordance with the cascade training approach.
Just to emphasize the need for a digital culture that generates awareness, the title of the events being arranged by LibreUmbria is “Digital natives do not exist”. That awareness is currently lacking and there are as yet no “natives”.