Bolu Orhangazi Secondary School Information Technologies Counselor Tarık OTU
We talked about Pardus with our teacher Tarık OTU, who works as an Information Technologies guidance teacher at Bolu Orhangazi Secondary School and supports the Pardus Transformation.
1. Mr. Tarık, can you introduce yourself to our readers?
Tarık OTU I have been working as an Information Technologies Counselor at Bolu Orhangazi Secondary School since 2015. I am interested in coding, robotic coding, design and free software in the fields of Information Technology.
2. Bolu 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?
Pardus is installed in 98% of the boards currently installed in our city, and its dissemination efforts continue. Since PARDUS is already installed on Phase 3 boards, we do not do any work.
3. What were the biggest challenges you faced during the Pardus Transformation? How did you overcome these?
First of all, it is very important for our provincial administrators to take ownership of this project, both on behalf of the province and on behalf of our teachers. As the province of Bolu, it was important for the future of Pardus that the Provincial Director of National Education Yasin TEPE and the Provincial IT Coordinator Orhan DOĞRUÖZ took ownership of the project. We started the process by preparing Provincial IT Coordinator Orhan DOĞRUÖZ's migration plan to Pardusa carefully and meeting with Şenol ALDIBAŞ, the Trainer in charge of Tübitak Ulak, to provide training to all IT Guidance Teachers in our city. Later, Orhan DOĞRUÖZ shared all the schools in our province with IT counselors, and we completed the establishment and training process of these schools. Currently, we continue to support our schools by making the process permanent as the Pardus responsible of these schools. In this way, our teachers realized that they were not alone. In this way, I would like to express my thanks again to Yasin TEPE and Orhan DOĞRUÖZ.
When we started the PARDUS installation, the first and biggest reaction came from our teachers. But the trick here is not to leave the teacher alone. On behalf of my own school, I am trying to solve the teacher's problem as soon as one of our teachers has any problems with Pardus. Over time, this built trust and reduced prejudices. In summary, I saw that it is very important to own the system when integrating the teacher or the classroom into a completely different system. When you are with the teacher, teachers see that Pardus is not different from other operating systems in terms of ease of use, and even PARDUS is more practical and easier to use. After integrating with Pardus, we got a lot of feedback that it is not logical to use other systems. But there are teachers who resist to use the opposite. These will pass over time.
Another challenge was working with Z-books used by teachers. It was a separate challenge to break the prejudices of publishers on this issue. Because this process created a workload for them as well. But since we are a very large audience, they made the necessary studies and published the books compatible with Pardus.
I have a memory for my own school that I want to tell. A publishing house came to our school at the beginning of the year and was about to sell Z-Books, and I interrupted for a minute. We use PARDUS at our school, are your publications appropriate? I asked. No, they said it is compatible with other software. I said with a very clear stance that we will continue to use PARDUS in our school, either you can harmonize your publications or our teachers will not work with you. A week later, the engineer friend of the publishing house called me and thanked me for our sensitivity to the subject. My teacher said, "I'm very happy, let me use Pardus a little bit, I will make it compatible with your boards and share it." Afterwards, the related books were made compatible with Pardus and we continued to use them. We still haven't broken our communication with that engineer friend. He was also a very good open source coder. In summary, we have experienced that all obstacles can be overcome when we have a clear attitude in the process.
4. What were the attitudes of teachers and students during the transformation? What did you do to break the prejudices?
The prejudices of the teachers were too much. In order to break their prejudices, our IT Guidance teachers held Pardus introductory and information meetings in all existing schools in our province. With the introduction of the operating system, we did not leave our teachers alone and purified them from their prejudices.
While our students are explaining the subject of Operating systems in the Information Technologies course, I devote a large space to PARDUS. They like it very much. In fact, there are students who install PARDUS on their computers at home, who want me to bring them and install them, who declare themselves the PARDUS officer of the class and take care of the board.
5. What are our teachers' perspectives on Pardus right now?
The integration rate of our teachers into the PARDUS operating system is almost 95%. From time to time, as a result of the difficulties they experience, they may have prejudices about the use of Pardus, but most of our teachers state that they use Pardus more comfortably than other operating systems. One of the things that attracts our teachers here is that the software is safe. Living in a virus-free system makes our teachers feel safe. Together with one of our teachers, we answered the questions asked while applying for an e-security certificate that our school has just received. While writing the answers, our teacher said, "I didn't think our school was so safe." It would be enough to get 22 points from that security test, and we earned a safe school certificate for our school by getting 68 points in that test with the opportunities provided by using PARDUS.
6. How do students approach Pardus?
Our students are very interested in what they see in the lessons. As I explained above, we have students who dedicate themselves to this job. They are even more interested when I explain the problem South Korea has with Google in the lessons. But in general, their approach is reflected very positively.
7. What are your suggestions for our provinces that have not yet completed the Pardus transformation?
Our advantage as Bolu was that our Provincial Director of National Education Yasin TEPE and our IT Provincial Coordinator Orhan DOĞRUÖZ believed in the subject and took ownership of the project. My advice to the provinces that have not yet started the migration process to Pardus is to organize a planned migration process by applying the organizational information meetings, trainings, and ET installation planning correctly. This was the key for us to complete the migration process in Bolu in a short time and efficiently.
