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Summary of the week Summary of the week

Summary of the week

Thank you for all your posts on the Week 1 message board about FLOSS.

We talked about both what software people are using, as well as issues you have with using FLOSS, and in some cases what is stopping you from using FLOSS in your school.

 

Here is the FLOSS you said you are using:

VLEs (Moodle, Viko, Fronter)

Joomla

Liferay (eg this Community of practice)

Image editing (IrfanView, Picnik, Gimp, Picasa), 

Zimbra (email)

Sound editing (Audacity)

Mind mapping (Mindomo.com)

Scribus

Open Office, 

Google documents, 

survey creation (Google form, www.surveymonkey.com and others)

Astronomy (stellarium and Celestia)

Maths (Geogebra)

Physics (free simulations)

 

Here are some of the issues & problems we talked about:

Cannot download software on school computers

Difficult to use 

Time-consuming to use

Language barrier (software not in my language)

Software going 

Software initially free, then not

Forced to use free software (e.g. Linux in all schools in a region), but quality an issue

Google tools - are they free software (no access to code, so not open source)

Persuading colleagues to use FLOSS can be difficult (people not open to new ideas and approaches)

Document Library Document Library

Folder # of Folders # of Documents  
Week 1 0 4
Week 2 0 5
Week 3
Subfolders: My movie 		1 7
Week 4 0 3
Week 5 0 2
Week 6 0 0
Showing 6 results.

Week 1: 12-18 March

Free, Libre, Open Source Software (FLOSS) 

What is FLOSS?

Free, Libre, Open Source Software (FLOSS) is any software distributed under a licence that allows users to change or share the software source code. The three most important characteristics of FLOSS are that:

  1. it allows free (unrestricted) redistribution 
  2. the source code is available at minimal cost 
  3. derived works may be redistributed under similar non-restrictive terms.

Why is FLOSS interesting for education?

  1. It is free (or very cheap) 
  2. It can offer new approaches to teaching and learning, specifically enabling personalised learning and enhanced learner voice 
  3. It can enable knowledge sharing and collaboration between teachers 
  4. It can overcome structural divides between developers of educational software and its users.

For more information on FLOSS and education, read this Futurelab report on FLOSS

The Strengths and Weaknesses of FLOSS

Some of these can be found in this document

Topic 1 Topic 1

Some examples of where FLOSS is used in schools

FLOSS can be used virtually anywhere in a school setting. See this document for some examples. 

Where do you use FLOSS in your school?

Take part in a discussion about how you use Free, Libre Open Source Software in your school, in teh message board, here: http://ingenious-science.eu/web/cop-technology/week-1/-/message_boards/message/38012

Topic 2 Topic 2

What are the barriers to using FLOSS in your school?

What are the practicalities of using FLOSS in school?

 

What are the specific issues or barriers stopping you using them?

 

Mentioned earlier this week by people on the Community are issues such as:

  1. Not being able to download software to school computers
  2. Not being sure whether FLOSS really is Free
  3. Software beinf Free to begin with, but then later not being Free
  4. Software becoming unavailable (e.g. a company shutting down)
Message Boards (Week 1) Message Boards (Week 1)

Category Categories Threads Posts  
Issues with using FLOSS in school 0 1 1 RSS RSS
Using FLOSS in schools 0 8 27 RSS RSS
Showing 2 results.