Weekly Tech Tip - Open Source

Weekly Tech Tip:



Related Links:

• The Top 50 Proprietary Programs that Drive You Crazy — and Their Open Source Alternatives
• Curriki
• Wikibooks
  
• OER Commons
• MN Learning Commons
• MIT Open Courseware
• Wikiversity
• University of the People
• 250 Free Online Courses from Top Universities
• Online, Bigger Classes May Be Better Classes - From the Chronicle of Higher Education
  

Video Festival:

• Ben Cameron: The true power of the performing arts
• Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from
• John Holt on education and learning from a homeschooling conference in the 1980s (3 clips)
  
• I prefer not to take your test
• 
  

Link Stew:

• The Education Conference Calendar
  
• Tubinator - Extract and Download Video from Practically Any Site
  

Newsreel:

• Schoolwork by Nicholas Lemann (The New Yorker)
• Grading 'Waiting for Superman' Dana Goldstein (The Nation)
  
• Oprah and her warrior woman, Michelle Rhee by Valerie Strauss (Washington Post)
• Why Michelle Rhee and Adrian Fenty Lost By Diane Ravitch (Education Week)
• Remedial Study for Failing Public Schools By TRIP GABRIEL (NY Times)
  

Blog Carnival:

• Breaking Down Unschooling by Adam Burk on Pushing Upward: Growing a Culture of Peace
• Education Nation & Ideological Blindness by Gary Stager on Stager-to-Go
• Designed to Fail - Education in America: Part One, Part Two, Part ThreeBy Ira Socol on SpeEdChange
• Education Nation, Oprah and ‘The Bigger Picture’ by Bill Ferriter on The Tempered Radical
• Reclaiming the language by Joe Bowman on Dangerously Irrelevant
• The Death of Subjective Values by yours truly on Dangerously Irrelevant
• How To Teach For Jobs That Don’t Exist by Shawn Cornally on Dangerously Irrelevant
• A heart so empty… by Paul Blogush on Blogush
• Cost of NCLB Testing Info Graphic ($5.3 billion is TOO high) by Kelly Tenkely on iLearn Technology
• Is the Education Crisis a Myth? by Rose Garrett on Change.org
• Pledge to See a Movie During This National Emergency by Jim Horn on Common Dreams.org
• Dear Ms. Winfrey by Stephanie Sandifer on Change Agency
• What Randi Weingarten Should Have Said by Chris Lehmann on Practical Theory
  

Texas School Board Curriculum Survival Kit

#edchat #Texas @russgoerend

I can't help but get emotionally upset by the most recent turn of events in Texas. I am grateful that my children will not be going to school there any time soon. A couple months ago I spliced together this video on the matter and posted it to YouTube but had not taken the time to share it here until now:



Now, it appears there has even been some attempt by members of the Texas School Board to block student access to the very same open source curriculum I refer to in this video. Given the outrageousness of the curriculum they just passed 9 to 5 I am sure they will be successful in this initiative as well.

So, here is my new simple 3 step
Texas School Board Curriculum Survival Kit:

1.


2. Create your own wiki to make corrections and/or replacements to supplement the curriculum missing or misrepresented in the new textbooks (you could even have your students help you do this as a project). I am sure at least one of these tools will make it through the Board's filters:

• - Free wiki host. Allows you to create web pages that anyone with a password can quickly and easily edit. Great for community knowledge construction and information gathering.
• - Free wiki host. Allows you to create web pages that anyone with a password can quickly and easily edit. Great for community knowledge construction and information gathering.
• - Free wiki host. Allows you to create web pages that anyone with a password can quickly and easily edit. Great for community knowledge construction and information gathering.
• - Free wiki host that integrates well with other Google products.
• - Free wiki host. Allows you to create web pages that anyone with a password can quickly and easily edit. Great for community knowledge construction and information gathering.
• - Free wiki host. Has a drag and drop editor for easy page layout. Supports audio and video captions.
• - your online notebook based on wiki
• - Quick and easy to way to collaborate online with others. YourDraft creates an online document similar to Microsoft Word and gives you a URL of that document. Others you share the URL with can edit the document too without a password.
• Savable online text document that saves a copy of every edit. Kind of like a one page wiki.
• - Simple web publishing tool: copy and paste content then click publish
• - Free wiki host with a social element that allows users to create their own profile pages. Kind of a blend between PBwiki and Ning!.
• Couchit - Very simple wiki development tool.

(This could also be done with Zoho or Google Docs)

3. Use Quickmark to make QR Codes or Stickybits to make scanable bar codes that can be placed in the fraudulent textbooks which link to pages of your wiki that contain the information your students should be learning.

[Step 3 is derived from a project idea Russ Goerend (@russgoerend) and I came up with via a discussion on Twitter a few weeks ago.]

Houston, we have a problem (and a solution)! #edchat #aft

Open Source & Education

I came across this panel discussion of education fellows today at Pop!Tech. Fascinating and powerful discussion regarding open source principles in education and education reform.

@ Yahoo! Video

At the end of this video a question is asked, "With all of this technology, what is lost?" What are your thoughts?

Free Software

Our school district is likely to make the shift to Linux next fall. Right now I do not know if this is going to be an all out shift or if we will still keep some Windows machines (right now the only Macs we have are dinosaurs). While I love open source and have written before about how the right combination of open source, online apps, and web 2.0 tools can create an ideal technology setup for school settings I still see a need not to totally sever the cord with Microsoft. If only because we still have some software that will not work on any other machine. However, by fall this might not be so true when you look at the rapid growth in the open source sector.

Since the beginning of the school year I have wanted to create a feature on our website where teachers, students, and community members could go and find free software they can trust. With our almost certain shift in operating system I anticipate a small learning curve come September. The biggest confusion will be what software to use or which programs roughly equate to what we used before. I think we can kill two birds with one stone if this downloads page on our website is presented as both a resource and instructive. I have spent the better part of today putting this together. If you have seen our digital backpack you will recognize the style since I hijacked the code to make this.


I am looking for feedback.

• What programs should I include that are missing?

• Are there better alternatives to the programs I included?

• What would you include in a resource like this that I have missed?

• What download links are faulty (I don't have a Mac to test the Mac downloads)?

P.S. I am still looking for feedback on the digital backpack.

Installing My First Linux OS

Well, I am excited. I have been reading/researching open source software for a long time and finally have a spare machine to install Linux on. Our school just got 4 used laptops from Johnson Space Center and I have the go ahead to do a trial. To this point we have played around with Open Office, GIMPshop, Firefox, and to some degree Scribus but have never installed an open source OS on any of our school computers.

My goal is to install Linux on a handful of school computers in the computer lab and load them with open source software that equates with the proprietary software our students and faculty are used to. I will make signs that will be posted next to each machine explaining how they are similar and different and provide a small "Smart Card" next for every two workstations that have graphic oriented tutorials for use.

Distro:

This has perhaps been the most frustrating part of this experiment. There has been a lot of press about using Ubuntu in schools and it appears to be a very reliable OS. However, for some reason the kernel did not jive with these Dell Latitude D600s we got from the government. After a little digging I found that PCLinuxOS 2007 works well without a glitch. Installation was a cinch using this distro. Normally when we have to format and install a new Windows system it is an overnight ordeal. Once I figured out how everything was to be configured PCLinuxOS took no more than an hour.

When you startup PCLinuxOS under the logo is a slogan, "Radically simple." Radical indeed. So simple everything is intuitive but still good enough to have everything I need: Office Software, Image Software, Internet Access, Multimedia Editing Software, and a Reliable File System.

Why is this so exciting?

If my trial is successful and the students take well to this new OS and to the open source software we can run on it our school district stands to save thousands of dollars. We estimate that our little school district alone would have to pay Microsoft around $70k to renew our licenses for Windows and Office. What would you do with an extra $70k? Currently our school district has three computer labs and only one of which is truly up to date. Our teachers just received new laptops but our student use equipment is either out dated or there is not enough for teachers to plan any real tech integration. If we take this money, invest a large portion of it in infrastructure (network, hubs, servers, etc.) and take portion of the money to spend on shipping slightly outdated computers from government agencies and cooperate partners we can get very close to a computer student ratio worth talking about. I have blogged here before about how I am not sure our district is ready to implement a 1:1 laptop program yet and I still feel that way but this would be the next step in that direction. Besides, the jury is still out on the effectiveness and appropriateness of a 1:1 computing. I strongly suspect the research will point us in that direction but for now I propose, at least for our school, that a 5:1 or a 3:1 program is what is best right now.

If we can put 5-10 computers in each classroom it would drastically change the way our teachers teach and our students learn. SMARTboards and high performance teacher laptops are great but they lack the engagement that hands on computing can offer. Placing the tools where we want them to be used is a huge step in becoming a school that teaches 21st century skills well. I hear almost daily from teachers, "I would use this if I knew I could get my students in the lab." Why don't we put the lab in their classroom. The other positive aspect of a 3 or 4 to 1 program would be that it would force teachers to be creative with their instruction. It promotes collaboration and differentiated instruction.

Techno Lust

I have been wrestling lately with the topic of technology over indulgence. Do we really always need the latest and greatest? At what point does a technology reach its point of maximum potential? Do I really need a pocket knife with 36 different blades, a place to hold a tooth pick, and silverware? At what point do we look at our televisions and say, "Do I really need 900 channels? I never watch more than 10 of them." At what point do we say, "This latest version of Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office, Windows, etc has cool features but I still only use the ones my old version had." Do we really need a faster processor when a Pentium 4 still does everything I NEED it to do? Does our school really need to have SMARTboards in EVERY classroom? Should we spend our money on one totally awesome gadget with ten million incredible features that also does your laundry for you and tells you when to use the rest room or could we take that gadget money and buy 5 slightly inferior products that do all that but only has nine million incredible features?


Sure, if I worked at Pixar and had the task of rendering the next blockbuster animated feature and had to include special effects that are more advanced than the last film I think I would take the one machine that folds laundry for me but I work in a school district. Our processing needs will never rival those of power users that exist in big business. Often the skills necessary to operate and utilize those obscure power options in most commercial software require study of the software beyond k-12 education. In fact, if we get too much into teaching kids how to utilize these power features we risk neglecting our primary goal as k-12 educators. Is our goal to teach technology or use technology to teach content? If our goal is to teach technology maybe we should invest in the high power machine and superfluous commercial software. However, we will have to have students work in large groups and have to find something else for them to do while others in the class have their turn at the nice machine. If, however, we are trying to utilize technology to better teach content our needs are better served with more simple solutions.


Enter open source and online apps. I have been playing around this year with both of these kids of applications and have fallen in love with both. I think they are perfect for education, at least k-12 education. Most open source software nearly mimics the look, feel, and functionality of commercial brand counterparts and whatever tech skills are necessary to operate one platform are also necessary to operate the other so skills are transferable. Online apps. answer another problem that I see all the time in schools. That problem is compatibility. If we encourage our students to use online apps. for their assignments then it won't matter what kind of machine they are using, everything is compatible. My goal is never again to hear, "I can't show you my PowerPoint because your version is incompatible with the one I have at home." or, "I couldn't work on my PowerPoint at home because I couldn't open the file."


If we decide not to renew our licenses with Microsoft, Adobe, and other commercial software providers we can save tons of money to reinvest in our network and hardware. If we replace it with a fully functioning, easy to use platform we can focus more on how it can be used to make learning reading, writing, science, art, social studies, math, physical education, etc. more engaging, authentic, and learner centered. We take that saved money and invest it in hardware that will serve our needs, not hardware that far exceeds our needs and we will be happy. I think I choose to do my laundry myself.

Firefox Add-ons

I may never log-in manually to my Blogger account again to publish posts. I may be slow to this and am feeling a bit like I missed the boat big time but I am just now discovering the extraordinary value of Firefox Add-ons.

My interest in Firefox Add-ons started about a month ago when I first del.icio.us buttons to my browser. Before then I was using Firefox as-is. It seems to me that add-ons must be a huge reason Firefox has taken off so well in the browser battle. Today I added three new add-ons to my browser that I think have great value for education.

1. ScribeFire - coordinates with your blog account to allow you to publish blogposts directly from Firefox without having to login yourself to your account. The post editor looks pretty good too.
2. Zotero - This amazing add-on is meant specifically for education and scholarly research. It is a way of keeping track of research and other literature that is out there in electronic format. There are just too many features this add-on offers to describe. Basically, it combines a bookmark feature with note taking and citation tools. You just have to see it.
3. IE Tab - Before installing this I had to use IE7 to adequately login to the course managemnt system for my part-time online teaching job. This would be a big problem if my full-time school district switched to Linux. What this add-on does is emulate IE in Firefox so Firefox will display IE only websites. I tried it and it seemed to work better than IE.

Free Image Editors

Yesterday I blogged about some of the online operating systems featured in PC Magazine's March 2008 article "The Best Free Software." Today I had a chance to evaluate some of the graphics programs they include in their list.

As an artist and art educator I have long had a love affair with Adobe Photoshop and for that matter most Adobe products but last summer when I first was introduced to GIMP I started to have a change of heart. I found GIMP inspiring because, just like most open source software, it leveled the playing field for those who cannot afford premium applications like Photoshop. However, I never really found myself using it. I still preferred Adobe because of the look and feel of the program. GIMP with all of its windows is cumbersome to manage. Commands are not located in the same place, or even very similar places as they are in Photoshop.

Today I found two other free programs that look and feel like Adobe Photoshop, offer the basic features that I use Photoshop for, and are more user friendly than GIMP. First is Paint.net. According to their website this program was originally developed by an undergraduate student with the help of Microsoft. It was at one time slated to replace Paint as the free image editing software to come with the Windows OS. Why they did not go with it I am not sure. Now it is in open source. This program looks and feels like Paint but has the functionality of an early version of Adobe Photoshop.
The only real problem I see with this program is it is only currently available on Windows. Our district is seriously looking at moving to Linux next year and if we do this program will not be supported.

The other program I found and am just ecstatic about is Splashup. Splashup is a flash based image editing program that looks almost exactly like Adobe Photoshop in your browser. It does all the basic things you need a good photo editor to do. Since it is web based you don't have to download anything. If you have an internet connection you can edit your photos. You also do not need to sign up for an account with Splashup the way you do with other online image editing tools. Since it is flash based it is then also cross platform. The only downside to this application is that it cannot be downloaded.

One cool feature that I like in Splashup is the webcam capture feature as demonstrated in this picture. The only big problem I found with Splashup is the inability to copy and paste between programs. I tried pasting this screen capture of Splashup in Splashup but it would not let me. I had to use Paint.net to save this final screen cap.