The inclusive classroom

This is the setup of my classroom at the Edeys school in Le Haillan, which I offer to other schools that welcome dys, ADHD or autistic pupils. It comes in three parts in front of the class: workstations designed for these pupils, the teacher’s supervision console and a classroom application that works offline. Behind them sits the school’s cloud. The setup runs every day in my classroom.

I install it, administer it remotely and train the team to use it. The fleet is made of Ubuntu laptops, split by room. The school’s cloud is hosted in Germany: files and online office tools on OpenCloud, directory and sign-in on Keycloak, encrypted backups every night with BorgBackup.

The pupil signs in first, then everything goes through a single entry, Home, which replaces the desktop and brings together their applications and sites. The workstation offers as few options as possible, with enlarged text and a dyslexia-friendly font from the start. It reads texts aloud in French, offers built-in tutorials, and opens PDFs in Okular, whose annotation tools were chosen with the school’s occupational therapist.

Work saves itself, with a version history, in drawers: Take for what the teacher hands out, Keep for what the pupil produces, Hand in for what they submit. A workstation never restarts in front of a pupil, and “I’m done” saves everything then switches off. From the console, I see the screen of each workstation, and the configuration reapplies itself three times a day, first on a single trial workstation.

The need comes from my classroom. Dys, ADHD or autistic pupils, many of whom are discovering the computer, get lost in options they do not need, and every restart costs lesson time. So I remove before I add, and I first ask whether the pupil can go without seeing what is displayed.

One research question stays open: does a workstation that does less make pupils more independent? Today I judge it by what I observe in class, and these practitioner observations are not measurements. For supervision, I fixed two defects of Wayland supervision upstream in Veyon, rather than working around the tool.