Favorite Open Source Software

I am trying to expose my colleagues to great open source (or otherwise free) software. So far they use or have access to Moodle, Audacity, Sketchup, Google Earth, Tuxpaint, and of course Firefox. For web site maintenance we use Joomla! We have MS Office, so Open Office and friends are not really necessary. I have contemplated exposing them to The Gimp, or Gimpshop, but for most elementary classrooms that would be primarily a teacher tool.

I am looking for tools that would be especially good to use with elementary students. What other great classroom tools should I share with them?

Tags: elementary, open, oss, software, source

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Permalink Reply by Teacher K on April 6, 2007 at 12:45pm

On a personal level, I have been contemplating using Nvu or Seamonkey. Does anyone have experience with these? Would one of them be good for a recovering Dreamweaver user?

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Permalink Reply by nlowell on April 6, 2007 at 1:43pm

Nvu is a really good Dreamweaver replacement.

I use Bluefish on linux

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Permalink Reply by Chris Craft on April 6, 2007 at 4:27pm

Kompozer is Nvu re-released with a lot of the bugs fixed. I like it much better, and even better than Dreamweaver and Frontpage.

I use Kompozer cross-platform.

Chris

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Permalink Reply by nlowell on April 6, 2007 at 4:39pm

W00t!! Thanks Chris. That's good to know. I'm not as on top of the windows platform as I could be these days because I do all my development work on my linux machine so i appreciate the follow up!!

Kompozer can be found here and I see it has a linux version, too! Hm. I might be tempted to see how it compares to Bluefish!!

Thanks again!

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Permalink Reply by Teacher K on April 6, 2007 at 6:31pm

Excellent! I do prefer cross-platform software. Both of my schools are a mixture of Macs and PCs, so I like things that work everywhere. I will have to try Kompozer.

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Permalink Reply by Steve Hargadon on April 6, 2007 at 12:56pm

I've got a wiki going on K12 Open Source Software at www.k12opensource.com. Lots of good resources. Jim Klein at Saugus Unified School District contributed a huge part of the list.

Audacity is a real favorite!

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Permalink Reply by Teacher K on April 6, 2007 at 7:07pm

Wow! There is some good stuff in there. It will take me a while to mine it all.

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Permalink Reply by Marielle Lange on November 8, 2007 at 11:17am

Steve, I edited your wiki to add SchoolForge on the resources pages. I couldn't find reference of it on the pages I looked at.

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Permalink Reply by Steve Hargadon on November 12, 2007 at 11:09am

Good! Thanks for doing that. Should have been there.

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Permalink Reply by Jeff O'Hara on January 29, 2008 at 10:38am

What happened to the http://www.k12opensource.com wiki?

-Jeff
http://edmodo.com

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Permalink Reply by Paul Harrington on April 6, 2007 at 1:38pm

Hi - I teach primary ( elementary ) in the UK open source or freeware I use - ArtRage2 ( free version art software). For blogging I use blogspot.com, or edublogs - also David Warlick's Classblogmeister ( elementary pupils write their own blogs ) or think.com. If you fancy podcasting there are plenty of free host sites such as Odeo , Podomatic or Jellycast. I hope this is of some use??

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Permalink Reply by Teacher K on April 6, 2007 at 7:06pm

ArtRage2 looks interesting. I will have to play with it for a while. I should have mentioned above that we are running Wordpress on one of our servers. We also have a few classroom teachers who are using Moodle to meet their students' blogging needs. I will look into the podcasting sites. I have just started to skim the surface of podcasting myself, so I am still trying to work out good ways to introduce it to most of my teachers. Thanks for the suggestions!