Ordu Information Technologies Provincial Coordinator Ömer Çağdaş ATASU
We talked about Pardus with our teacher Ömer Çağdaş ATASU, who is the provincial coordinator of Ordu Information Technologies and supports the Pardus Transformation.
Cagdas, could you introduce yourself to our readers?
We talked about Pardus with our teacher Ömer Çağdaş ATASU, who is the provincial coordinator of Ordu Information Technologies and supports the Pardus Transformation.
I am Omer Cagdas ATASU. I am a 36-year-old Information Technologies teacher. I am carrying out the task of Fatih Project – IT Provincial Coordinator in Ordu province with the assignment of the Ministry of National Education. I am married and have 2 children.
Ordu province is one of the leading provinces in Pardus ETAP transformation. Your efforts to increase the use of Pardus in schools are great. What is the current Pardus and ETAP usage status in your schools?
More than 95% use of Pardus continues, some schools returned to Windows due to the inability to run the EBA Live course during the pandemic process, then we migrated many of them back to Pardus. Windows continues to be used in some vocational courses in Vocational Technical Anatolian High Schools because they cannot find a suitable program in Pardus.
What were the biggest challenges you faced during the Pardus Transformation? How did you overcome these?
Habits were hard to break. We organized training for our Pardus Migration Teams with our TÜBİTAK Pardus Trainer Şenol ALDIBAŞ and Pardus volunteer Information Technologies teacher İbrahim Paşa AKÇA. It was very beneficial for the teams to receive training from skilled people. While 3 teams of 2 people each went to the schools during the migration, the other teachers made a presentation of Pardus. In this way, we did not experience much difficulty. However, the teachers' requests to use Z-Books with .exe extension made us a little difficult. We especially resisted the publishing houses. Publishing houses also had to issue Z-Books with .deb extension. We don't have much difficulty anymore.
What were the attitudes of teachers and students during the transformation? What did you do to break the prejudices?
Our migration teams understand the concepts of Free Software, Open Source Software, Native software, are not infected, are able to open their own private sessions, etc. We did not encounter much prejudice because he explained it to the teachers during the introduction. After these introductions, many of our teachers asked why it was not passed until now, it was beautiful, it should be supported, etc. complaints occurred.
What are our teachers' perspectives on Pardus right now?
Our teachers, who know a little about using computer software, are generally satisfied. But the truth is that many of our teachers continue to use Windows on their personal computers. There are those who complain a little because the interfaces are different. Many of them are experienced teachers who are nearing retirement.
How do students approach Pardus?
These students cannot use ET much because some of our high schools use passwords in case of access to inappropriate content. In our other schools, our students use it and the students got used to it faster than the teachers.
What are your suggestions for our provinces that have not yet completed the Pardus transformation?
Pardus is a software developed by the developers of our country. We all need your support for its dissemination and development. The more usage, the more feedback to developers, and the easier it is to detect and fix bugs, if any. If we want to be independent, if we want to be free, we must definitely use it and encourage its use.
Our students, who are the future of our country, should also know what Pardus is, so we should use Pardus in all Interactive Boards, especially in our schools. MEB Yegitek puts PARDUS obligatory in the Interactive Board procurement tenders made after FAZ-2 within the scope of the Yegitek FATIH Project, this is a big step, but it may encourage the provinces to use it in the ETs that were purchased before.
