Cut spending, Try open source

Tyler Krehbiel – Technology Coordinator; SW/WC Service Cooperative team shared a number of great resources that are available online for free.  Let the kids figure out the tech–you can focus on the teaching.  But where to find opensource software?  Beyond the usual search engines, or his excellent suggestions below, try osalt.com, sourceforge.net, or codeplex.com.

• Audacity–excellent and easy to use sound recorder and editor
• Scribus–great desktop publishing application
• OpenOffice.org–features basic suite of applications for word processing, presentations, spreadsheets, graphics, and database
• GIMP–basic replacement for image editing programs (like Photoshop)
• InkScape–vector imaging program, great for making logos, uses mathematical equations to generate images

Network administrators and computer teachers might especially be interested in the following:

• FOG–a free computer cloning solution (requires a separate server or virtual machine to set up) 
• Google Docs–collaborative, available anywhere
• Apache Web Server–runs more than half of the websites in the world
• MailArchiva–mail archiving system supports most email servers (including Exchange)
• Spiceworks–features for IT management like helpdesk, inventory, monitoring, etc.  will create tickets from email uses a web interface

And a few other treats:

• Firefox–web browser
• Thunderbird–email client
• Evernote–remember everything
• Chrome–Google’s web browser
• GnuCash–accounting software