Skip to main content

OpenSource in Education

After a long silence I'm back. Since I've landed my new lecturer role I have been busy creating Schemes of Work, Lesson Plans and researching ways to increase resources for students so they may have a better learning experience.

In fact, it is the former of the items that this article relates to. The first obvious question is why? Well, the college that I am in provides tuition for international students, who have given up a lot to come here and study. Many of these students are struggling to find work to support themselves during their studies, so if they require resources "free" is a keyword.

These type of resources, that I refer to here, are mostly concerned with software. So let's get started.

OpenOffice.org

Students will be using Writer for all their courses, Calc for subjects relating to maths, economics, accounting, etc, Impress for subjects that require students to present.

There are a number of reasons for selecting this application:

  1. It is open source which means that the students do not need to look for cheaper alternatives to Microsoft Office. This encouraged students to be proactive in their learning and inspired them to install the software at home and work on their assignments in their own time
  2. It is a recognised alternative to MS Office
  3. Generous licensing terms in distributing the application
  4. Encourages collaboration between students so that they may share work and study together. In fact lecturers here have picked up on this and are sharing documents with students. Unfortunately, with Office 2007 it is easy to forget to "Save as" an older version to share with others.
Mac users will benefit from NeoOffice.

Dia

While OpenOffice.org has a Draw application, which many students are using effectively, what if they want to produce Flowcharts, UML diagrams, etc?

This application was slightly inspired by Microsoft Visio but is aimed towards a more casual approach to drawing diagrams. You can also export diagrams to many formats including PNG and SVG.

Notepad++

A very decent text editor, with support for many different languages and can integrate with the compiler of a number of languages.

I currently use this to teach Java programming.

jMemorize or FreeMind

The students still need to revise and work on improving their memorising capabilities. jMemorize uses the flash card technique which are familiar with. Alternatively, FreeMind, makes use of the mind mapping technique and is sometimes used to create a site links page for web sites.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Will we ever get Dreamweaver on Linux?

I have been a keen user of Ubuntu for some time now, and have to admit that this distribution has improved by leaps and bounds. However, what I do honestly miss on windows is... Dreamweaver. Some will swear by it, some will swear at the mention of its name. But for me, it is a very powerful tool when used correctly. Such a very popular and powerful web design and development tool is available on Windows and Mac OS, but not Linux. If you would just consider, Adobe has already supported the platform with their Adobe Reader and Adobe Air. Why is Dreamweaver not available? It just seems that there's not such a huge call for it so they just don't see the need to put in an effort for another platform. One chap at Adobe suggested to use Dreameaver under wine , but it doesn't work so great. There is an alternative to wine which, according to a user on the forums, works flawlessly - Crossover . However, the former option is not free, so some may be dissuaded where they woul...
Post a Comment
Read more

Image links in IE8

While mocking up a design page for a colleague's website I came across a new browser behaviour in IE8. This was the first time I used IE8 as my main development browser, due to the fact that the PC was re-installed and high-priority updates were applied. Surprisingly Microsoft branded IE8 as a priority update. Anyway, back to what I was talking about, here's a sample: <a href="index.htm"><img src="logo2.jpg" alt="Logo" title="Logo" /></a> As you can tell, this is using an image for a link, where it behaves well in Chrome, Firefox and in the previous versions of IE (7 and older). But in IE8, this is not the case as the DOM does not treat the image as innerText, only as a child node. As a result, everytime I hover the mouse over this image, an extra gap would come from nowhere shifting any relatively positioned elements. To fix this I explicitly added a space (&nbsp;), so the line would look like: <a href="inde...
3 comments
Read more

Open Source alternatives to Adobe Creative Suite

With the take over of Macromedia by Adobe, they have increased their arsenal of design packages, as well as the price. No-one can do pretty much without the popular package of Photoshop for their images, and Dreamweaver for websites, especially aspiring design students who do not have much money. Nevertheless, open source software has come to save the day. What is open source software? In a nutshell it is free software with its source-code freely available to those who would like to expand or improve on the software. To expand further, anyone who’s tinkered with the source code such as optimisation or additional functionality can resubmit it back to the holders and let others enjoy the fruits of your labour. I have trawled through the World Wide Web to find out how everyone can benefit from Open Source to build up their own studio and compete against Adobe Creative Suite. All this for free, apart from the cost of the Internet. I am planning to have a facility where you can purchase...
14 comments
Read more