A Toolkit of Back to School Open Source Apps
by Lisa Hoover - Aug. 21, 2009Comments (1)- Related Blog Posts
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It's that time again. Youngsters are polishing apples for the teacher, parents are buying school supplies, and university students are wincing at the high cost of textbooks. Fortunately, there are several free open source computer- and Web-based applications students can use for everything from note-taking to scheduling classes projects. These apps won't do your homework for you, but they'll take the sting out of getting it done.
Task Coach - Set tasks to alert or reoccur, sort by attribute, view by list or as a tree, and more. You can also drag and drop emails from Thunderbird to create a new task, and add files, emails, and URLs as attachments. Task Coach is even small enough to be transported on a thumb drive.
Flat World Knowledge - In an effort to make curriculum content more accessible to both students and teachers, New York-based startup Flat World Knowledge is going after the textbook industry by offering expertly-written books that educational institutions are free to modify to meet their needs.
Luminotes - A terrific Web-based personal wiki that helps you collect and organize information. It's great for project planning, book writing, or as an in-basket for random data you want to hang on to. It doesn't require any special markup skills so Luminotes is a great collaboration tool for people with all levels of computer experience. For solo use or for working offline, there's a desktop version that runs on Linux and Windows.
Lyx - If you do a lot of academic writing, theses, or scientific papers, Lyx will make sure the structure of your documents meets formal acceptance requirements. This app helps you with those niggling formatting details, and includes several templates to get you up and running in no time. It also includes a mathematical formula editor, support for several graphic formats, and shared geometry settings for multiple figures.
If the students in your household are home educated, then check out this post all about open source apps for homeschoolers. It covers software for learning about everything from astronomy to typing, and even looks at ways to schedule your day and stay on top of projects.
If you want to overhaul your entire operating system, make sure you take a look at our three-part series on popular educational Linux distributions.
Flickr image courtesy of Bill Ward's Brickpile.
