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FRee paint software that is much more powerful than the native paint program. The students love this open source software.

Development of important open source middleware to allow schools and districts to meet the demands of individualized instruction. 

How cool. Ardulab is an open source platform powered by Arduiono to help monitor and control experiments sent to the International Space station. As I talked with Kaci Heins this week on every Classroom Matters, she has her students designing experiments to go onto the space station. This is doable. We have an ardino in my classroom. Very cool.

Ransomware is a new kind of malware. The worst Ransomware to hit in some time is the Crypto virus. This virus encrypts your hard drive and you have to send them a $300 certificate (untraceable) so they'll give you the encryption key to decrypt your drive and get your data back. In an interesting twist, the US government disabled the servers running this ransomware scan and now all of the people with the virus have no hope of getting their decryption keys. This is another reason you should be very careful NOT to open suspicious attachments even from legitimate sounding sources. (Many of these messages appeared to be from Fedex and UPS.) The greatest internet filter ever created is the human brain. Educate teachers and others - not through fear but through a skeptical empowerment that always thinks before it clicks and especially before it downloads.

Open Source software is "not like free beer. It's more like free puppies."

Explore Opsound for open source sounds/music really beaut discoveries here but this link is for exploring the history of open source ideas etc...

Outstanding Open Source software site. I just used the PDF Sam to merge PDF files and it worked instantly.

Thanks for sharing!

Open source online video conferencing and distance collaboration tool. Can be installed on Linux web server and contains many standard collaborative features such as voice/video chat, shared whiteboard, screen sharing, and more.

Resource with lists of open source graphics & visualization tools

recent Curriki open source ed links on Twitter

The goal of RubyGrade is to provide an opensource online gradebook system similar to Engrade and Chalksite . RubyGrade enables teachers to keep track of students' grades and attendance records. The main difference being that RubyGrade is open source, free to use, and can be downloaded to run on a local server.

Social Media Classroom Open Source Howard Rheingold 21st Century Literacies

this is the type of software mentioned in the wired article: Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak

Anki is a program designed to help you remember facts (such as words and phrases in a foreign language) as easily, quickly and efficiently as possible. To do this, it tracks how well you remember each fact, and uses that information to optimally schedule review times. Theoretically this will greatly increase the amount of material you remember, making study more productive. Free and open source, binaries available for Win, Mac and Debian ^_^

Permalink for a list of 157 Free Applications for the PC and MAC. This list includes all of the top apps, and some that may suprise you. If you are into open source or freeware, this article from PCMag is a must read.

Children, teenagers, and adults need books to be able to learn to read and getting accessible books to them is the goal of the Tar Heel Reader.

Pencil is an animation/drawing software for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. It lets you create traditional hand-drawn animation (cartoon) using both bitmap and vector graphics. Pencil is free and open source.

opensource materials for Mac

Celestia is a free and open source space simulator that allows you to explore space right from your computer. Celestia is available for download on Windows, Mac OS X, and even Linux. Celestia has many very cool features, including an eclipse finder. Not only does the eclipse finder allow you to find solar and lunar eclipses on Earth, but you can seek eclipses on other planets as well. I found out something really cool when checking out eclipses on Jupiter - because Jupiter is very large and has many moons, solar eclipses are very common.