Shahid Online - Tech Corner

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: It is open sourc...

Many people think that Open Source software is only for the home user. How wrong can they be? Very. I remember many years ago of how many charities and companies started to migrate to the Linux platform, in order to use open source software. The fundamental reason for this was that the software is free and the second reason was that there was not much open source software on the Windows operating system. Being free software, companies can reduce their overheads and not worry about the licensing restrictions that big companies impose. The big problem with commercial software is that there are so many features making them require higher spec machines. So you're stuck with your existing software or forced to upgrade your PC. By reading my previous posts you can tell that I am an Open Source advocate. But I really believe (among others) that Open Source software has left the bedroom a long time ago and you can really run a business using Open Source. Just don't forget to make a con...