It never ceases to amaze me how many educational institutions “push” commercial software when there is perfectly good open source and free alternatives. Some schools are spending way too much money on applications form Microsoft and others when their are fantastic alternatives. This is not a Microsoft bash, but it is odd to me that even some technically knowledgeable teachers and professors are not really teaching our kids computing, they are only showing them how to use Microsoft or another big companies software.

With the budget crunch in so many schools, one way to curb some unnecessary expense is to opt for open source for word processing and other basic computing needs.

It is totally unfair for a teacher to require a student to purchase an expensive application like Adobe Dreamweaver to learn basic HTML. This can be taught with a free text editor and the computers browser. If you want to use a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) there are free open source alternatives that are quite powerful and are not that different in use from the expensive commercial applications.

Here is a list of inexpensive (most times free) applications that teachers and students should give a try. It will save you money and in some ways time.

If you know an educator or student send them this list.

Office Applications
OpenOffice.org - Free, open source, cross platform - a fully-featured desktop application office suite compatible with leading office products such as Microsoft Office. Can easily replace MS Office for most teachers and students. Available for Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista, Linux, and Mac OS X. Mac OS X users will need to install X11 (Leopard users already have this). A fully Aqua version for OS X is coming soon for public release. Mac users should also check out NeoOffice.

NeoOffice - Free (Mac Only) desktop software port of OpenOffice.org with fully-featured set of office applications (including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing programs) for OS X platform.

IBM Lotus Symphony - Free for your home, school or business for Windows and Linux users. Richly-featured productivity tools that are intuitive to use and compatible with your files that allows you to easy it is to switch from Microsoft® Word®, Microsoft® PowerPoint®, or Microsoft® Excel®. IBM® Lotus® Symphony™ offers something for everyone – a community-oriented site, a template gallery, and tips and support to help you succeed. Your business can get more control over spiraling upgrade costs while protecting and maintaining documents into the future. If you’re a developer, Lotus Symphony supports Microsoft® Windows® and Office applications, which means you get even more from your current investments.

Google Docs and Spreadsheet - Free web-based word processor and spreadsheet, which allow you share and collaborate online. Google Docs accepts most popular file formats, including DOC, XLS, ODT, ODS, RTF, CSV, PPT, etc. So go ahead and upload your existing files created in Microsoft Office. Also check Google For Educators.

Zoho - Free and totally comprehensive online suite that includes Zoho Writer - Word Processor, Zoho Sheet - Spreadsheets Online, Zoho Show - Online Presentation Tool, Zoho Creator - Create Database Applications, and many more. Zoho have just announced a desktop version allowing users to not use Zoho Writer when there is no Internet connection.

ThinkFree Office Online - Free clones of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that run in your browser. ThinkFree opens and saves to standard Microsoft Office formats: DOC, XLS, PPT. They can even save to PDF, something that MS Office doesn’t do yet. To make this clear, you open up local files and can save them on your hard drive. If you want to save them to ThinkFree’s servers, they give you 30MB of storage space.

Writeboard - Free online text documents that you can collaborate and share.

Citation Machine is an interactive web tool designed to assist high school, college, and university students, their teachers, and independent researchers in their effort to respect other people’s intellectual properties. Free online can be used instead of Endnote in many cases. MLA format only: http://citastic.com/

Page Layout
Scribus is Cross platform, free and open source - professional page layout and desktop publisher with press-ready output. If you don’t have Quark or Adobe InDesign here is an alternative.

Study Aids
iFlash, $14.95 for OS X - create virtual flashcards, store decks, and even upload decks to their online database. You can visit the database and download home made decks by other users, or upload your own. iFlash, if told to, even auto-defines vocabulary words you put on the front of the flash card.

Mental Case, $39 for OS X - revolutionary new flash card application designed to integrate into your daily work flow. Like other flash card apps, you can use it to learn a language, memorize trivia, or study for an exam, but that’s just the beginning: Mental Case allows you to quickly capture any tidbit of useful information from any application in a mental note. What’s more, it automatically generates lessons from your notes, and even tells you when you should study.

Web Design and Development
Nvu - Free and Open Source, A complete Web Authoring WYSIWYG System for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X that rivals GoLive, FrontPage and Dreamweaver.

SeaMonkey - Free all-in-one internet application suite containing an Internet browser, email & newsgroup client, HTML editor, IRC chat and web development tools. Versions for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux are available.

Amaya - Free web editor available for Windows, Unix platforms and MacOS X. HTML + CSS style sheets editor with support for XML and an increasing number of XML applications such as the XHTML family, MathML, and SVG.

HTML-Kit - Free full-featured free editor for HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and other text files for Windows Vista, XP, 2003, 2000, NT 4, ME, 98 and 95.

Blogs and CMS (Content Management System)
WordPress - Free blogging for all platforms - personal publishing/blogging platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. Also see WordPress.com for a free hosted solution of WordPress. Also see Blogger, Vox and Edublogs that offer free education blogs built on WordPress.

Drupal - Free open source content management platform.

FTP
CyberDuck - Freeware, OS X - FTP and SFTP solid, reasonably fast, and loaded with features.

Fugu is a free open source frontend for SFTP (Secure FTP), SCP and SSH. It is released under a BSD license, and supports Mac OS X.

SmartFTP - FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client which allows you to transfer files between your local computer and a server on the Internet. Free Unlicensed version for education is available.

FileZilla is a free, open source FTP client for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X distributed under the GNU General Public License.

SurFTP - FTP to any server through this web interface free. Supports SSL and has a built-in editor for text, HTML, or PHP files.

Collaboration and Communication
SubEthaEdit - Shareware $42.74 USD, 45% off discount for teachers and students - OS X only - powerful and collaborative text editor. Great for education and collaborative note taking in a classroom or over the Internet. SubEthaEdit is a great tool for showing, teaching and helping with any text based task from programming to writing essays. SubEthaEdit allows you to set collaborators in a “Read only” group, preventing them from writing anything, but ideal for showing something or working in turns. By using invitations students can ask for help on a specific problem.

Skype - Free for all platforms - VoIP, IM and Video Conferencing. Make telephone calls to from your computer, Instant Messaging, and Video Conference. The only cost is for calling landline or mobile phones. Skype to Skype calls are free.

XMeeting - Free and open source, OS X only - H.323 & SIP Videoconferencing Solution for Mac OS X compatible with NetMeeting, GnomeMeeting, and commercial endpoints like Tandberg and Polycom. Like having a free version of Polycom ViaVideo on a Mac.

Ekiga (formely known as GnomeMeeting) - Free and open source, Windows only - H.323 & SIP Videoconferencing Solution. It supports many audio and video codecs, and is interoperable with other SIP compliant software and also with Microsoft NetMeeting.

meebo - Free. Chat on any of the major networks: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, Jabber, GTalk, or MSN. Nice, clean interface and very responsive.

The Phone Company (TPC) - Free online Fax service - Send a text-based fax many places in the world via email or the browser interface.

ScreenSteps - Windows and OS X, $39.95 or $59.95 for Pro - makes creating visual training and documentation almost effortless. I must for computer training.

TiffanyScreens - cross-platform, free version and $39 licensed version - share presentations (or any screen content) with your peer group, without requiring a projector using screen sharing.

Image Editing
GIMPshop - Free for OS X, Linux, Windows - Gimp is a powerful, open source image editing application. For more info on the Gimp visit gimp.org. GIMPshop is essentially the same program with some cosmetic changes.

Inkscape - Freeware and Open Source, OS X, Windows, and Linux - vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X.

Splashup - Free Photoshop-like Online Editor No need to on Photoshop to do basic (and some advanced) photo editing. Also there is Picnik and Snipshot for your image editing online needs.

Seashore - OS X only. Free open source image editor based on GIMP, but is 100 percent Cocoa and integrates perfectly with OS X.

Paint.NET - free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows.

Lineform, $79, $59 Education price - very similar to Adobe’s Illustrator, a vector-based drawing program for OS X that uses a lot of Apple’s built-in technology which includes Core Image, Spotlight and Applescript

Art
ArtRage - Freeware for OS X and Windows - painting package designed to provide a realistic and fun simulation of using paint on a canvas, along with pens, pencils, crayons, and other tools like Corel Painter.

Audio and Video
Audacity - Free for all platforms, open source software for recording and editing sound, music, etc.

VLC media player - Free for all platforms - highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. This app plays almost anything.

MPEG Streamclip - Freeware, OS X and Windows XP - MPEG Streamclip is an application that converts MPEG files to QT, DV, AVI, muxed or demuxed.

CamStudio is a free Windows application that is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs)

Organize
SchoolHouse 2: Free homework manager for Mac users - Helps students keep their Homework organized. With the ability to sort and organize your assignments, exams, and projects quickly and easily Schoolhouse is a must have for any student on-the-go. The power of smart notebooks allow you to interact with your work as simply as your iTunes library.

Assignment Planner - free OS X application for Mac users which allows you to keep track of homework assignments for a number of different courses

Mozilla Sunbird - free cross-platform calendar application, built upon Mozilla Toolkit.

Basecamp - Free Online Project Manager / Project Tracker. It’s primary functions are to share, prioritize and assign tasks and to schedule due dates and milestones. You can, of course, also share notes within your organization.

Grade Slider, free - Inspired by the old cardboard grade sliders, Grade Slider is an application to aid teachers grading tests and quizzes by providing a list of calculated percentages. Requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher.

NoteShare, $149.95 - powerful desktop application for creating, publishing and sharing media rich, multi-page notebooks.

NoteTaker, $69.95, Academic $39.95 - personal note and idea organizer.

NoteTaker Viewer, Free - gives OS X users the ability to conveniently view notebook content in its original format with support for full multimedia playback and web page viewing as well.

del.icio.us - A social bookmarks manager. Using bookmarklets, you can add bookmarks to your list and categorize them. Students and Teachers can share bookmarks for projects.

Twitter is a free service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate. Social networking and microblogging service utilizing instant messaging, SMS or a web interface. Share links, notes, etc.

Assignment Planner, $5.00 for OS X - allows you to jot down assignments in a calendar-style layout or a list layout. You can file assignments into categories, sort them by complete and incomplete, and insert “metadata” for the assignments, including course, textbook, and type. Assigmment Planner also comes with a Dashboard widget, allowing you to view upcoming assignments in your dashboard.

Selenium, $15 - is an application designed to assist with conducting research on the Internet. It allows you to create multiple projects, each of which has its own writing section, bibliography manager, outline editor and PDF manager. Selenium also incorporates a full-featured tabbed web browser to allow you to conduct research and work with the information you find all from within the same application.

Math & Calculators
Expression is a freeware, open-source, Windows scientific graphing calculator. Mac OS X has one built-in to the OS.

Online Conversion - Free. Convert just about anything to anything else. Over 5000 units and 50,000 conversions.

Soulver, $13.95 for OS X - a simple yet very advanced calculator. Soulver lets you do calculations in a plain text box, with the answer appearing next to the problem. It generates the answers instantly, and also auto-calculates the square root, the mean, the average, the mode, and much more.

Longhand, free for OS X - A revolutionary calculator. And yet extremely easy too grasp.

Give some of these applications a try. You will find them great alternatives for expensive commercial software. In many cases these free or cheaper applications are as good and sometimes they are actually better.

I did not write the post to bash commercial software. I use plenty myself. But forcing a student, especially one on a limited budget, to buy Dreamweaver to learn basic HTML is like uses a sledgehammer to put in a thumb tack! Think are you teaching computing or are you teaching them to use specific commercial applications?

Much of the software I outline here are open source. Most have wonderful support by their huge communities of users via forums and email. Anyone that has spent hours on the phone with Microsoft can tell you commercial software support is not superior in a lot of cases. Most commercial software problems end up being solved on similar online forums.

Personally, I would like to see more use in schools of open source that would certainly save some of the valuable school budget as well as show a neutral stance on proprietary technology and applications.

I do not buy the argument that students need to learn on what they will be using in business. Learning HTML in a program like Nvu, students would have little adjustment in working in Dreamweaver or FrontPage. Using OpenOffice is not going to challenge a student when put in front of Microsoft Office. Splashup and GimpStudio are actually a lot like Photoshop. So unless the class being taught specially to learn a commercial application, many times NONE are needed.

In fact, the case can be made this would make the students and teachers more resourceful, not less.

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