Aug. 15, 2009
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Australia is now giving every high school student a laptop, offering Lenovo machines with Windows 7 and some
open source applications.
About 70,000 high school students will get a new laptop. But for those who prefer open source applications, here's
a list of names which some are probably not familiar with:
Geo Gebra is a program for teaching high school math. It starts with geometry but also branches into algebra
and calculus. Created by Marcus Hohenwarter for a master’s thesis at the University of Salzburg, he now runs the
project out of Florida State University.
Audacity is a sound editor also available under Linux. It was launched at Carnegie-Mellon ten years ago by
Dominic Mazzoni and Roger Dannenberg and now makes its home on Sourceforge.
FreeMind is a mind mapping program written in Java. Mind maps are a great way to outline and brainstorm,
especially for those of us with ADD. It is not yet at Version 1.0, and it also lives at Sourceforge.
MuseScore is a music composition and notation program, which has also yet to reach Version 1.0. It recently
delivered its first stable release for the Macintosh, and its developers have just begun working on a branding
program.
We are often obsessed in technology by control of the operating system, and in the business press by questions
of money.
However, these programs are the tip of a very large iceberg and based in academia, that is slowly transforming
education and the education process.
Overall, students learn at the rate they do best and with their own aptitudes, and knowledge is spread at a similar
rate.
With about 17,000 of Australian students going to class this week carrying these programs they will spread
even more quickly. So will curricula based on them. And, unlike the 1990s’ multimedia curricula, these will be
fairly stable, so long as the programs retain backwards compatibility.
Any teacher interested in any of these Windows programs has to learn to use them, and has to develop coherent
lesson plans for them. Given how open source eliminates marketing budgets, it also takes time for news of such
programs to spread.
But news does spread, and sometimes they have a tendency of spreading very fast...
News of these programs have spread all the way to the Land Down Under, and apparently to the highest realms of
the New South Wales government.
It will be interesting to see if other countries follow a similar path. School boards and colleges all over
the world appear to be opening up to the many benefits of computers in the education segment.
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Source: AITN.
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