Open Education Software

From OpenEducationWiki

See also the Free Software for Schools Catalog.

Table of contents
1 Software for schools
2 Desktop Applications

2.1 OpenOffice.org
2.2 Audacity

3 Education delivery - e-learning tools
4 Digital content - repositories
5 Library management systems
6 Web - content management, portals
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Software for schools

Schoolforge's mission is to unify independent organizations that advocate, use, and develop open resources for primary and secondary education. Schoolforge is intended to empower member organizations to make open educational resources more effective, efficient, and ubiquitous by enhancing communication, sharing resources, and increasing the transparency of development. Schoolforge members advocate the use of open source and free software, open texts and lessons, and open curricula for the advancement of education and the betterment of humankind.

"School Tools for Online Resource Management" is designed to aid schools in moving away from pedestrian systems of managing IT facilities and resources. The target audience is a school, but other environments, such as small businesses, could easily make use of the tools.

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Desktop Applications

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OpenOffice.org

Reasonably complete replacement for MS Office, includes a word-processor (OOWriter, replaces MS Word), spreadsheet (OOCalc, replaces MS Excel), presentation program (OOImpress, replaces MS PowerPoint), drawing program (OODraw, substantial superset of MS Draw) and (as of version 2.) database program (OOBase, replaces MS Access).

OpenOffice reads and writes MS Office documents, and in fact can often open and recover damaged or old documents otherwise deemed irrecoverable, and also includes PDF export.

OpenOffice's native document format is ZIPped XML (and as of version 2.0, the formally ratified OASIS standard) which is straightforward to unpack and process through other programs.

This has a particular moral application in that it can be legitimately sent home with students to replace pirated copies of MS Office, and as an upgrade for systems shipped with only MS Works.

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Audacity

Sound Editing software

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Education delivery - e-learning tools

LAMS is a revolutionary new tool for designing, managing and delivering online collaborative learning activities. It provides teachers with a highly intuitive visual authoring environment for creating sequences of learning activities. These activities can include a range of individual tasks, small group work and whole class activities based on both content and collaboration.

Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a 40,000-student University. The site itself is created using Moodle, so check out the Moodle Features demos, the Demonstration Courses or read the latest Moodle Buzz..

You may be intersted in this plateform "Claroline: Open Source e-learning". "Claroline is an Open Source software based on PHP/MySQL. It's a collaborative learning environment allowing teachers or education institutions to create and administer courses through the web. The system provides group management, forums, document repositories, calendar, chat, assignment areas, links, user profile administration on a single and highly integrated package.

Claroline is translated in 28 languages and used by hundreds of institutions around world.The software was initially started by the University of Louvain (Belgium) and released under Open Source licence (GPL). Since then, a comunity of developper around the world contributes to its development. Downloading and using Claroline is completly free of charge." Many of us have used it extensively. Teachers find it VERY easy. Just thought some might like an option.

The Sakai Project is a community source software development effort to design, build and deploy a new Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) for higher education. The Project began in January, 2004. The Sakai Project's primary goal is to deliver the Sakai application framework and associated CMS tools and components that are designed to work together. These components are for course management, and, as an augmentation of the original CMS model, they also support research collaboration. The software is being designed to be competitive with the best CMSs available. The tools are being built by designers, software architects and developers at different institutions, using an experimental variation of an open source development model called the community source model (see below). To provide a support system for institutions that want to be involved in the Sakai Project, either by adopting Sakai tools or by developing tools for inter-institutional portability, the Sakai Project has also formed the Sakai Educational Partners Program (SEPP) and the Sakai Commercial Affiliates Program. Educational software licence - http://opensource.org/licenses/ecl1.php

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Digital content - repositories

The DSpace digital repository system captures, stores, indexes, preserves, and distributes digital research material. Research institutions worldwide use this open source system in a variety of ways -- as an institutional repository, a learning object repository, for records management, and more. DSpace is freely available as open source software you can customize and extend.

Greenstone is a suite of software for building and distributing digital library collections. It provides a new way of organizing information and publishing it on the Internet or on CD-ROM. Greenstone is produced by the New Zealand Digital Library Project at the University of Waikato, and developed and distributed in cooperation with UNESCO and the Human Info NGO. It is open-source, multilingual software, issued under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

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Library management systems

Koha is an open-source Integrated Library System (ILS). In use worldwide, its development is steered by a growing community of libraries collaborating to achieve their technology goals. In use worldwide in libraries of all sizes, Koha is a true enterprise-class ILS with comprehensive functionality including basic or advanced options. Koha includes modules for circulation, cataloging, acquisitions, serials, reserves, patron management, branch relationships, and more. For a comprehensive overview of features visit the Koha feature map (http://www.koha.org/about-koha/features/index.html).

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Web - content management, portals

HyperContent is an open-source web content management system being developed by institutions of higher education under the sponsorship of the Java Architectures Special Interest Group (JA-SIG). HyperContent delivers a rich set of management and authoring tools which enable content experts, designers, developers and administrators to collaborate effectively in the production of high quality web sites with consistent navigation and design. XML storage makes data reuse and site evolution painless, and a pure Java architecture delivers a stable, scalable platform. HyperContent is free for anyone to download, use and/or modify. Adopters are encouraged to participate in the community by signing up for the mailing lists, posting in the forums and contributing development effort back to the project.

uPortal is a free, sharable portal under development by institutions of higher-education. This group sees an institutional portal as an abridged and customized version of the institutional Web presence... a "pocket-sized" version of the campus Web. Portal technology adds "customization" and "community" to the campus Web presence. Customization allows each user to define a unique and personal view of the campus Web. Community tools, such as chat, forums, survey, and so on, build relationships among campus constituencies. uPortal is an open-standard effort using Java, XML, JSP and J2EE. It is a collaborative development project with the effort shared among several of the JA-SIG member institutions. You may download uPortal and use it on your site at no cost. Licence - http://www.uportal.org/license.html

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