I have just returned from a vacation in beautiful Kraków, where, entirely coincidentally, there just happened to be a Fedora conference! My family and I enjoyed the amazing sights around Kraków (if you haven’t visited the salt mine, you really should), but my personal highlight was getting to attend my first Flock, where I got to meet people face to face who I’d only previously talked with via IRC and email.

I got to chance to speak about how we use Fedora in the classroom in our school (slides here). There were some excellent questions from the audience at the end, and I realized (again!) that my biggest problem is creating decent documentation about what we’re doing so others can follow.

One of my goals over the next year is to make sure that our work is easily reproducible in other schools, both from the sysadmin side and from the educational side.

My biggest take-away from the conference is that Fedora is moving into some very interesting times as it starts to expand from rpms being the only system delivery mechanism. I’m very interested in ostree with its concept of a read-only system partition and the work they’re doing on layered trees so you can have multiple system images branching off of one base image.

I’d really like to thank the event organizers for all the work they did putting Flock together, the design team for the beautiful t-shirts, and the Fedora community for just being great. And, while I’m at it, I’d like to extend personal thanks to Rafał Luzynski and his wife, Maja, for their hospitality.

So I’m sitting here in Kraków, doing some last-minute preparation for my talk (Fedora in the Classroom) at the upcoming Flock conference next week.

I’ll be looking at why we use Fedora in our school, what tools we use to setup and maintain our workstations, and the actual subjects that we teach our students, complete with actual projects1 that our students have done.

If you’re a teacher looking for ways to use open source software in the classroom, an administrator looking for a computer curriculum that emphasizes creativity and comprehension over memorization and rote learning, or you’re just interested in seeing how Fedora is effectively used in a school environment, please do come check it out.

  [1] Projects have been anonymized to protect student privacy