Educomm Asia – Volume 14 No. 4(a CEMCA Publication), carried an article on the Digital Photo Frame under the theme 'Smart Tips'. This article talked about the possibility as well as the potential of the Digital Photo Frames in carrying educational texts, audio, and video material on pen drives that could then be viewed on a Digital Photo Frames. This was suggested as a cost effective alternative for accessing quality educational material that was already available to the learners on a public domain – the internet.

Many such educational media support platforms/websites, provide material on the public domain, but this necessitates a Broad Band connection for access and a higher configuration of computer systems for learners to be able to view them properly. It also calls for higher bandwith for downloading video programmers. The servers that deliver such educational content have to have a higher bandwith in order to support a larger number of viewers/ loggers.

The Research Project

A research project was undertaken by the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA), in order to create a Digital Photo Frame that could in actual terms carry all types of educational content. But it was not enough to merely create an Educational Photo Frame. It had to be cost effective and hence, the need for sourcing cheaper development motherboards, with low power requirements and onboard processors. The objective was to keep the cost of the Educational Photo Frame low, the quality and medium of accessing information and knowledge extremely high and user friendly. Free Open Source Operating Systems were explored, analysed and studied as using a Licensed OS would mean higher costs.

This is a Front-end support to the EduFrame Research Project and it enables the Photo Frame carry out tasks that are available only on regular PCs/Laptops. Teachers will be supported by a facility to load Text, Audio, Video material to the EduFrame. The Photo Frame Enabled Educational Delivery system will support browsing and queries from the Frame end, which will be then be supported by a powerful backend interface. The learner can view the content and communicate with their teachers with the supports provided.

A team is step up to work on all available flavours of UNIX. Their mission is to select the one with the following features: 1. small in size and ready to work on a 1 or 2 GB pen drive that can be integrated with the motherboard in future 2. A system that supports Wi-Fi and media streaming 3. Web interfaces, 4. Supports for remote hardware handling

All these supports are expected to work on a cheap mother board with no fans, low power consumption and built in Multimedia playing supports, Wifi, and other interfaces essential for EduFrame usage. Along with these experiments an online support at the front-end, and upload facilities as the backend is also attempted.

DownLoad and Extract the file in a Directory and use this back-end support for interactions with EduFrame(Eduframe.zip):