Setting up a Computer with Free Software

[Updated: 7/22/17] The open-source and free-software movements have matured to the point where a teacher or student can reliably outfit a new computer with software that is free and compatible with their proprietary cousins.

The first place to look for free software for whatever purpose you need should probably be ~~SourceForge~~. It feels odd having to say this, but it’s legal, free software. Mind you, it has a lot of programs that are still in development, many are not terribly polished, and not everything will be available for your operating system. Add in a few other pieces, like Firefox and OpenOffice, and you have all the basics you need for a basic loadout. I typically find these to be most useful.

LibreOffice or OpenOffice: Free, but not as powerful alternatives to MicroSoft Office. They can open and save MS Office files, but also has some of the irritating auto-formatting issues as Office. So for text editing I usually prefer Smultron (on Mac) or Atom (on Windows). Also, Gnumeric is an excellent alternative to Excel.
Atom (Windows and Linux): An extremely versatile text editor that a lot of my students like for coding.
Smultron (Mac): for writing text and only text, forget the formatting (and also useful for writing computer programs).
Firefox: For web browsing.
GIMP: instead of PhotoShop for editing images.
Inkscape: For drawing diagrams (like this one).
VUE: For mindmaps (like this) and flow charts.
Audacity: works well for sound editing (I’ve only used it a little for trimming sound files when I was trying to create sound effects). Unlike SOX (see below) Audacity has a user interface.
OpenSCAD: For creating 3d models using basic shapes (spheres, boxes etc.) for 3d printing.
VPython: I usually introduce my students to programming with VPython, which is a Pythno library for creating 3d visualizations. The VPython downloads pages include instructions for installing Python.

There are other odds and ends that you’ll find on my computer, like vlc for playing DVD’s, Combine PDF for rearranging pages in pdf documents, and TexShop for really nice typsetting, but there are a lot of good, free alternatives out there. Not a whole lot of games however.

Command Line Programs

If you’re comfortable using the Linux command line there are a number of programs, most of which have been ported to the major operating systems (and you can use the Cygwin program to use a lot of Linux commands if you’re on Windows), that can also be very useful:

SoX: For generating sound tones and notes (e.g.),
ImageMagick: the convert command is particularly useful for working with images (their example page is excellent). The GIMP is based on this program.
gifsicle: for help making animated gifs (particularly for optimizing them).

Writing should first focus on the text

I have a great antipathy when my word processor tells me what to do, or, even worse, “corrects” my writing without my permission. So I avoid MS Word like the plague. OpenOffice is little better. Now I’ll admit that my writing is usually in great need of a good editor, but not looking over my shoulder, inserting little, irritating suggestions while I’m caught up in the turbulent rapids of self-expression. Getting into the flow of productive writing is difficult enough; I don’t need the extra distraction.

Instead I much prefer the plain text editors; Smultron has been a favorite of mine since I’ve been using Macs, and I spend a lot of time writing on the class Wiki (MediaWiki) and on this blog (WordPress), which both have very simple text-entry boxes.

WordPress and MediaWiki also process the text and make it presentable. Like most websites these days, this blog has a theme that tells it where to put the text, how to format it, what background to have, where to insert images, what to have in the header and footer, …. The theme I use was created by Karen Blundell and adapted to put in a couple of my own details, like the little citation thing, and the ability to name the reviewer and editors at the bottom of the post. I did spend a lot of time getting these things to work, but I did learn quite a bit about the inner workings of WordPress and CSS in doing them, and once they were done, I could forget about them entirely and just focus on the writing.

Similarly, with LaTeX, although it’s much more of a pain to figure out how to use. On the Muddle I use LaTeX to add mathematical equations, but it really is a fully-fledged typesetting program, designed for professionals.

cc-book-pages — Two pages from a booklet my class and I put together about a display of fossils. I used LaTeX to typeset.

My class recently created a little display of fossils collected from Coon Creek for a school fundraiser, and we put together a booklet for it. I had the students write their essays and put them up on our Wiki. Then I copied and pasted their text into a LaTeX document, added a couple chapters from some of my blog posts, and it did the rest to create a very nice looking book, complete with title page, table of contents and bibliography.

Setting up the LaTeX file was not trivial, since I’ve not used it in a number of years, and this was the first time I tried to format a book. But it creates beautifully looking documents, without all the mysterious formatting features that inevitably show up if you tried something this complex with Word.

There are, I’m sure, other software for publishing documents like this. However, LaTeX is free and so is the old version of Smultron. Smultron’s new version costs $4.99, but is probably worth it.

The Middle School Bank and Trust: A Personal Finance Simulation

mstbank-00 — Excel program for running the Middle School Bank in the personal finance simulation. As you can see, I'm creating an account for my student, Inigo Montoya.

To get students a little more familiar with personal finance, we’re doing a little bank account simulation, and I created a little Excel program to make things a little easier.

It’s really created for the class where students can come up to the bank individually, and the banker/teacher can enter their name and print out their checks as they open their account.

mstbank-01 — Excel program for running the Middle School Bank in the personal finance simulation.

The front sheet of the spreadsheet (called the “Bank Account” sheet) has three buttons. The first, the “Add New Account” button, asks you to enter the student’s name and it assigns the student an account number, which is used on all the checks and deposit slips. The other two buttons let you delete the last account you entered, and reset the entire spreadsheet, respectively.

Once you’ve created an account the spreadsheet updates the “Checks and Deposit Slips” sheet with the student’s name and account number. If you flip to that sheet you can print out eight checks and five deposit slips, which should be enough to get you through the simulation. The checks are numbered and have the student’s account number on them.

There are two other sheets. One is the “Checkbook Register”, which is generic and each student should get one, and the other is called “Customer Balances”. The latter is set up so you (the teacher) can enter all the deposits and withdrawals the students make, and keep track of it all on the same page.

Yes, it’s a bit of overkill, but I though that, since I was going through the effort, I should probably do a reasonable job. Besides, it gave me a chance to do a little Visual Basic programming to keep my hand in. While I teach programming using VPython (see this for example, but I’ll have to do a post about that sometime) you can do some very interesting things in Excel.

Note: I’ve updated the Excel file.

Graphing calculator pro. – Free app

Until tomorrow (Jan. 5th, 2011), the Graphing Calculator Pro iPod app is free (thanks Josh). It can do a lot, so it might take a minute figure out how to do the graphs and it can be a little fiddly (you can scale both axes separately, for example, which is nice unless you don’t intend to), but I like it. After just a couple of minutes, the student who found it was already playing with slopes.

Idea Sketch: Graphic organizer for the iPod

I’m quite happy for students to use their handheld devices if they’re being productive. They’ve used them to take text-based notes (I’m still not sure how they are able to type so fast), make flashcards (I need to find or make an app for notecards and bibliography cards for the IRP), and now they’ve discovered one for making graphic organizers called Idea Sketch (thanks go to J. for showing me, and M. for finding it).

I’ve been using graphic organizers (GOs) a lot at the beginning of the year and students are getting the idea that we will inevitably put one together to summarize the weekly themes. So today, during our Needs of People discussion/lesson, when I did a quick spot check to see what the the iPod users were doing with their devices, they showed me that they were already putting together GOs. Because I really want them to develop the skill themselves, I’ve not been giving them GOs ahead of time, and we’ve been practicing putting them together. I was quite happy to see them being proactive. Maybe the lesson helped after all.

Idea Sketch is simple, seems to work pretty well, and is a free download at least at them moment.

Financial reports and statistics

Sally, our school’s business manager, was kind enough to come in last month to help the financial department of the student run business organize its books. It was long overdue. We’d been improving our record keeping over the last couple years, but now we have much more detailed records of our income and expenses.

This is great for a number of reasons, the first of which is that students get some good experience working with spreadsheets. We use Excel, which in my opinion is far and away Microsoft’s best product (I’ve been using OpenOffice predominantly for the last year or so because, it improved quite a bit recently, and I’m a glutton for certain kinds of punishment.) I’ve been surprised by how many students get into college unable to do basic tables and charts, but hopefully this is changing.

The second reason is that the Finance committee can now use the data to give regular reports; income, expenses, profit, loss, all on a weekly basis. I expect the Bread division to benefit the most, since it has regular income and expenses, offering students frequent feedback on their progress. We’re now collecting a long-term, time-series data-set that will be very nice when we get to working on statistics in math later on.

In fact, we should be able to use this data to make simple financial projections. Linear projections of how much money we’ll have for our end-of-year trip will tie into algebra quite nicely, and, if we’re feeling ambitious, we can also get into linear regressions and the wave-like properties of the time series of data.

FreeRice – donate food with your vocabulary skills

The UN World Food Program (WFP) has the site FreeRice.com where for each vocabulary question you answer correctly it donates 10 grains of rice to the WFP. The site is quite ingenious, it uses the money generated by the banner adds at the bottom of the page to buy the rice. It was created by John Breen and donated to the WFP.

The site is going beyond vocabulary into other subjects such as geography (identify country capitals and countries), identifying chemical symbols, art, language and math (pre-algebra).

They also have a nice video of the rice being distributed to refugees from Myanmar sheltering in Bangladesh.