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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. 

If you want students to draft work in Google Docs, you have to teach them about the Research pane. It lets you search for the appropriate license (click the down arrow) and set the citation method. You can insert photos, search Google Scholar and a dictionary, your own files, and even the web. When you mouse over the item, you have the option to cite the source or insert a link. Very cool and handy for writers. This is an older feature that hasn't gotten the press it deserves in classrooms. If you have Google Apps for education this is a BIG DEAL because it simplifies finding pictures and does many other things that online citation generators do all within Google Docs.

World atlas is a site with simple data about the countries of the world. This from the creator of the site: "World Data Atlas is an ultimate source of world statistics on every country. It includes data on more than 2500 indicators. Topics cover Economics, Demographics, Health, Education, Energy and other socioeconomic information. "

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.

If you need "proof" of the merit of journalism programs, look no further than the "enemy" that has been the excuse for killing many journalism programs -- test scores. Read this NCTE position paper about journalism in the curriculum which states: "It is important to note that a body of research provides data showing that students who participate in journalism programs do better on testing and college language arts courses. In Journalism Kids Do Better (Dvorak, Lain, Dickson), research shows students who take journalistic writing courses score higher on the Advanced Placement English Language and Composition exam than students who take only AP or honors English courses. They also score higher on college entrance exams such as the ACT. "We've done a number of research studies that show that high school journalism is equal to or exceeds standard English [courses], Dvorak said. "Journalism students' writing skills, their sensitivity to audience, their use of grammar, punctuation, spelling, their concern with accuracy, their use of sources -- all of these things tended to be significantly higher in their performances."" I would also argue that many students who are not reached by AP or honors courses can be highly engaged in journalistic pursuits. If you want a strong writing program, make sure you have a school newspaper. Share this with your newspaper and annual staff advisors to help reinforce the merit of journalism programs with your board of education and administrators.

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...

What is Wolfram Alpha? It is a supercomputing brain. It provides calculates and provides comprehensive answers to most any science or math question. Unlike other search sources, you and your students can ask questions in plain language or various forms of abbreviated notation. Contrary to popular belief, Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine. Unlike popular search engines, which simply retrieve documents based on keyword searches, Wolfram computes answers based on known models of human knowledge. It provides answers which are complete with data and algorithms, representing real-world knowledge.

Simple and free tool for creating citations from a wide range of sources, including print and electronic.

The value of Twitter for helping you and your colleagues stay informed of the latest trends, ideas, resources, and Web 2.0 integration tools has increased tremendously in the past year. A Web 2.0 tool is available for exploiting the every growing information on Twitter to remove barriers and allow you to collaborate with other science and math teachers. This new online tool is paper.li - a source of daily Twitter newsletters in education.

While reading the syllabus for a new course you discovered there is a research paper project. These types of projects often require the need to carry out online research to find sources. The online world is vast, often making such research a time consuming drain on valuable study time. So what do you do? The following top 10 tips for successful online research below will help make time dedicated for research more efficient.

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.