Free and Open Source Software Recommendations!

Both Alix Peshette and I blogged on this today, so it seems to make sense to put it in a forum post that will better track the discussion. Great stuff!

Tags: floss, opensource

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Permalink Reply by Kelley Irish on January 16, 2008 at 7:47pm

Here are some of my favorite tools that are browser based:

Moovl= http://www.moovl.co.uk/ online tool which pupils can use to draw, animate and apply physical properties to objects in order to bring their pictures and words to life

Tesselations= http://www.geometrygames.org/ Free downloadable Software to create tesselations of your own

Create maps/floorplans= http://floorplanner.com/ and http://classroom.4teachers.org/

time line creator= http://www.readwritethink.org/materials/timeline/

Build a city http://www.citycreator.com/

http://www.kidsplan.com/plangame.htm great site for planning an entire neighborhood from start to finish. Includes planning, mapping, Neighborhood Land Use, Neighborhood Walk, Planning A Neighborhood, Architecture, Preserving A Neighborhood, Engineering, Landscape Architecture, and Local Government.

http://www.itsourtree.com/ Family Tree Maker on-line

http://brio.knex.com/customer/TrackBuilder.php track building software for wooden brio trains

http://www.abc.net.au/rollercoaster/ rollercoaster makers-forces

Coffee Shop http://armorgames.com/play/57/coffee-shop

Soda Play http://sodaplay.com animated models you can play with

BBC virtual garden planner. Allows you to plan a garden then view it in '3D'

Parachute Man Simulation Help the parachutist land safely. Good link for Science work on Forces.

Roller Coaster Designer - Design your own roller-coaster. Good link for Science work on Forces.

Global Warming simulation. Science museum climate change simulation. What happens if you don’t turn the light off?
http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/R/robots/ robot constructor

Permalink Reply by John Thompson on June 8, 2008 at 9:21am

What's the difference between "open source" software and "Web 2.0" applications?

Permalink Reply by Ed Hitchcock on June 8, 2008 at 4:18pm

Open source means it is not only free, but the source code is also free, so anyone can help out with development or modification of the software as they like. It need not be web based, either.
Web 2.0 is read-write internet based applications or environments (like Ning, Youtube, blogs, wikis, etc). Much web 2.0 software is free to use, but not open source.

Permalink Reply by Stacy Morford on July 6, 2008 at 7:33pm

Great list! I organized everyone's recommendations for my own use, and of course had to play with the new tools in the process. Here's the list mapped in FreeMind and exported into pdf format.
Thanks for sharing!

Attachments:

FLOSS Map.mm, 23 KB
FLOSS Map.pdf, 740 KB

Permalink Reply by Ed Hitchcock on July 8, 2008 at 10:56am

Cool, thanks!

Permalink Reply by Casey Adams on October 31, 2008 at 6:25am

Here is a great site that allows you to search by commercial product and then provides one or more open source alternatives: http://www.osalt.com Also, my company provides some open source administrative applications, including a web based SIS: http://os4ed.com, http://opensis.com.

Permalink Reply by John Thompson on October 31, 2008 at 6:41am

Does anyone have recommendations for an open source online course management system as a replacement for the commerical ones (e.g., Blackboard, ANGEL)? Has anyone used Moodle?

Permalink Reply by Randy Orwin on November 10, 2008 at 9:27pm

John, we have been using Moodle for going on four years now and absolutely love it. We have 3800 students and as of today have nearly 3700 users and over 300 courses on our Moodle server. We use it for basic web pages, collaboration spaces for administrators, library web sites and of course as a course management system for online assessments, assignments, forums, glossaries, podcasts and many others. We have a number of sites that are open to the public. Take a look at http://moodle.bainbridge.wednet.edu

I highly recommend Moodle. If we were using a comparable commercial product, it would cost me well over $40,000 per year for the number of courses and users that we currently have. Given our budget situation we would not have a course management system if we didn't have Moodle.

Randy Orwin