Chris Durham presenting on free and open source tools at CUE 2011 in Palm Springs

Recently myself and Dave Childers went down to Palm Springs to present at the CUE annual conference. CUE stands for computer using educators. The presentation was on a mix of free and open source tools to reduce computing costs in a 1:1 school. We discussed a few tools we use daily at ACEL Fresno Charter High School. I’ll briefly discuss them here.

Schoology: “Schoology is a free web-based learning management system (LMS) built on a social network. Schoology leverages the familiarity of popular social media tools to improve communication and collaboration.” If Facebook and Moodle had a child you would end up with Schoology. Schoology has a lot of very cool features for teachers and students, far more than I will go into in this short post so I highly recommend you at least click on the link and check them out. Here’s a snippet.

• Create School, Course & Group Pages
• Create Assignments, Tests & Quizzes
• Manage Grades & Attendance
• Course Analytics

We use Schoology to deliver content, files, links, and grades to students. This is a fantastic and feature rich tool for managing your 1:1 classroom.

Symbaloo: Symbaloo is a dashboard you can set as your homepage and spring to any site you have setup a tile for. We use it as a simple and cool looking launchpad for the students to access their commonly used pages but it has so much more potential. You can create webmixes and package lessons with all the online resources your students would need right on one page. You can also embed youtube videos and Google Documents right into your webmix, allowing the students to complete an entire lesson without ever having to leave  Symbaloo. It is also a great way to share resources for staff development. It also has a lot of potential for personal use.

I have met the CEO of Symbaloo and he is a very cool guy. He is definitely open to new uses for their product. So tell him Chris Durham from CUE sent you.

Google Apps: If you haven’t heard about Google Apps by now then you should start to question your worth. Seriously though, if you can, you need to be using Google Apps in your classroom. There are countless sites out there which explain ways to incorporate Google Apps into your classroom, just Google it.

We use Google Apps for just about anything and everything. Every student and teacher has an account so we are able to easily communicate and collaborate. The live collaboration on documents and presentations is by far the most used feature. Students working on the same presentation at the same time is mighty powerful stuff.

iTalc: iTalc is a free tool which allows you to monitor and control student computers. Similar to Apple Remote Desktop.

“iTALC has been designed for usage in school. Therefore it offers a lot of possibilities to teachers, such as

• see what’s going on in computer-labs by using overview mode and make snapshots
• remote-control computers to support and help other people
• show a demo (either in fullscreen or in a window) – the teacher’s screen is shown on all student’s computers in realtime
• lock workstations for moving undivided attention to teacher
• send text-messages to students
• powering on/off and rebooting computers per remote
• remote logon and logoff and remote execution of arbitrary commands/scripts
• home-schooling – iTALC’s network-technology is not restricted to a subnet and therefore students at home can join lessons via VPN-connections just by installing iTALC client”

We run Linux on our student netbooks and iTalc works for both Linux and Windows.

Diigo: Cloud based bookmarking and so much more.

Diigo V5: Collect and Highlight, Then Remember! from diigobuzz on Vimeo.

We use Diigo for staff professional development and each Teacher uses it individually in various capacities.

GIMP: This is a fantastic tool. It’s basically a free version of Adobe Photoshop which works on Linux, Windows and OSX. It is very powerful (although photoshop is better) and has a large user base which means there are lots of tutorials and videos on the internet to help you get going. The learning curve is not as bad as you would think. I use this program with 9th graders and in no time they are compositing images and placing themselves into historical photos. Check out GIMPKnowHow’s Youtube channel for some fun project ideas and tutorials.

Do you use any free or open source tools on a daily basis in your classroom?