Just caught a nice post by Jane Park on the Creative Commons blog about teaching open source software. In the post she highlights three new free and open content works that are for education audiences. All these works are released under Creative Commons licenses (CC BY and CC BY-SA):
- Practical Open Source Software Exploration: How to Be Productively Lost, the Open Source Way is a textbook aimed at classrooms, as well as useful for self-learners. Educators can remix the content, customize it for an environment, and even do all that live with students.
- A K12 Educator’s Guide to Open Source Software is an updated list of free and open source software and resources that K12 teachers can use immediately in the classroom and on any operating system. The PDF from MáirÃn’s blog post is focused on design tools, such as for vector illustrating and bitmap painting and image manipulation.1
- The Open Source Way:Â Creating and nurturing communities of contributors is a handbook you can use, remix, and contribute to.
- Even better, they can pass out the same software to their students to use at home. Teachers and students can know they are using something they are free to redistribute to anyone, anytime, anywhere. I enjoyed seeing a similar presentation at the Computer Using Educators conference last year, where the teachers who did the presentation had also put together a CD of software for operating systems more teachers use. ↩