Did you ever use open source tools in school?

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Opensource.com

People of all ages are heading back to school now. For the next couple of weeks, Opensource.com is highlighting a range of open source software, hardware, and tools for students and educators. We'll also sprinkle in open education stories for good measure.

Read more in our Back to School series.

Which open source educational tools have you used? Or which ones do you wish had been available when you were in school? If you are a teacher, which open source software or hardware solutions do you use in the classroom or to manage lessons? We'd love to hear your experiences with open source education solutions and invite you to submit your story idea.

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72 votes tallied
Yes (tell us which software/hardware/tool)
69% (50 votes)
No (tell us why you wish you had)
31% (22 votes)

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18 Comments

I'm a university student right now, and just finished a summer class in which we used Moodle for class discussions and submitting assignments. I also personally use LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, and (Ubuntu) Linux on a daily basis.

How did you like Moodle?

We use open source in our business and don't miss propriety apps - or their cost. Instead we have LibreOffice, Gimp, Inkscape, Bluefish etc. With open source indisputably the future (robotics, IoT) it's worrying that more schools don't encourage pupils to explore alternatives to MS by making sure they have access to it. Once they are out of education, they're going to have to start paying the full whack for the apps they use. Ouch.

We hear this argument often for why schools should start using open source software sooner.

In high school / grade school, not so much. Our computer labs were Apple IIc and later Windows-based machines that were pretty locked down. I learned to program with QBasic then Turbo Pascal, though I transferred some of my knowledge when I got home to working with c/c++ in DJGPP and the Allergo game programming library. I was tickled to learn just a few weeks ago that the creator of DJGPP is now a fellow Red Hatter.

In undergrad, we occasionally used some open source tools, but mostly stuck to proprietary options. I remember fighting with my TA in one of my entry-level classes about the fact that I didn't want to use Visual J++ as my dev environment. Undergrad was when I first started using Linux on the desktop full-time, and when I spent a lot of time learning about Apache, Perl, PHP, and various open source CMSs for web design side projects that I had only touched the surface of in high school.

It wasn't until grad school when I started using open source tools on par with their closed source siblings - we used Dia, GRASS, OpenLayers, and various components of the OpenGeo Suite alongside Esri options. I also TA'd a class for three terms which we administered in Moodle, which was a welcome switch from the proprietary course management software I had to deal with in undergrad.

I worked in education for 14 years, mostly in the Canadian North. In many schools I found many broken machines riddled with malware or otherwise refusing to boot. Some ran pathetically slowly. I often installed Debian GNU/Linux and found these problems disappeared. In one extreme case, a lab of older machines was extremely unreliable with machines taking ages to boot if at all. The oldest was 15 years old and the youngest about 8. On many days there were not enough machines running for classes. I was constantly called to "fix" things. Eventually, teachers went to management and demanded a real fix. I donated a dual-core AMD64 machine as GNU/Linux terminal server and made all the old machines boot PXE so the old machines immediately showed a tremendous increase in speed. They booted faster too. I scraped together similar discarded PCs from all over the school and got them working too. In one day that lab went from having 7 poorly working machines to 24 machines working well every day. Service requests went to zero. All this was for zero hardware outlay and just a few hours of work. Most of the work was getting X to work on ancient video cards, some with as little as 4MB RAM. Because most files were cached in RAM on the server, that old lab performed better than the high school lab full of P4 thick clients with XP. Another school went from only half of our 40 XP machines working to all of 90 GNU/Linux machines working very well with almost zero problems. GNU/Linux works for schools, keeping them in the business of educating not fixing That Other OS and slaving for M$.

I'm using LibreOffice Writer regularly to write my assignments. We are also regularly using Dev-C++ to compile and run C/C+++ applications, but most of my student colleagues doesn't even realize that this IDE is open source. Unfortunately, other than that, we're mostly Microsoft-dependent.

EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention SquirrelMail and Roundcube! We're using them as an interface for our school email accounts.

I am trying to use as much opensource in school as possible. I am a sysadmin and helping out several schools with their ICT environment.
For a server setup I use Karoshi server An Ubuntu LTS based distribution that is highly scalable and offers about every tool a school can wish for: From Learning Object authoring tool (Xerte online Toolkit) to Electronic Learning Environment (Moodle) but also an Email environment (SOGo) and webbased file distribution (Owncloud)
Every service is Samba integrated so you can use them with network credentials. You can install the services on a single server, or spread them over several different servers.
Have a look at http://www.linuxschools.com

My laptop and desktop runs Ubuntu 14.04. So I use all the programs that come default with it such as LibreOffice and gedit. I have used GIMP, VLC, and OpenShot for a few projects. My college uses VirtualBox and even has a Raspberry Pi class(though I have not taken it) !

yes i currently do i use libreoffice linux mint firefox i know google chrome is not open source but i also use it and android if you want time new roman on libreoffice go here to how to geek link http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/15495/add-microsoft-core-fonts-to-ubuntu/

Stellarium. But I have no idea why, since it was in a science class taught by a track coach that was not at all sci/tech literate. But hey, yay for access and accidents.

Just about everything, and I believe the LXDE environment I'm using with Fedora makes my laptop last a loooong time.

I use Gnote, LibreOffice, Thunderbird, Firefox, Calibre and Shutter, as well as the GNOME .pdf viewer. I admit I use Chrome more than I should though...

In Taiwan we have a project under the Ministry of Education to promote open source software and tools in schools. We collect many good open source software and public domain resources not only for education but also for many other fields like office/graphics/audio/video and make a system called ezgo. More information is here:

https://dot.kde.org/2013/10/02/ezgo-free-and-open-source-software-taiwans-schools

The most frequently used open software software / tools / public domain resources in Taiwan's schools include:
- Libreoffice (teach / used in all kinds of subjects)
- Xmind
- Gimp
- Inkscape
- Shutter
- Kdenlive
- Musescore
- Firefox
- Gcompris
- Anki
- Stellarium
- Geogebra
- PhET
- Moodle
- (MIT) Scratch
- 7-zip

Now in Taiwan there are also plenty of schools starting to use open hardware like Arduino / Raspberry Pi / Banana Pi in their computer classes.

i used OpenOffice in graduate school and it worked very well. I also used Audacity to record podcasts for instructional materials and I used Moodle too.

I first started "consciously" using open source by using Open Office in 2002. I started back to college and could not afford Microsoft Office. The fact that something that good was created and supported by a community of developers was eye opening. I currently use Ubuntu 14.04 in my work as a teacher, and of the 5 laptop carts we use in our middle school, 1 of them runs Ubuntu (a first in Minnesota, I think). Within the next 2-3 weeks, we will bring a second Linux cart into service for our classroom teachers to check out. I also have a bank of 5 desktop PCs running Linux in my classroom for students to use. Last year, our school adopted a "FOSS First" policy, so if a teacher wants the school to buy a software package, they must check to see if an open source alternative is available. We now have a package of open source apps that are installed on all student computers in the building. So, there's a few things, I guess.

Hey, I would be very interested in a copy of that "FOSS First" policy. I think it would help my own managing of our school IT quite a lot.

Yes, although not generally as guided by the curriculum, more that I would either use an open source I was familiar with already or readily available after a little research.

The best piece of software I used in University was Lyx. Best piece of easy to use Latex software ever! Much better than using LibreOffice (also used) or something like TexMaker.