Information Technology Resources For Schools

Information Technology Resources For Schools

Information and communication technologies have the potential to improve the quality of education. However, educational institutions are often faced with financial constraints. The high costs of these technologies can also prove to be a major obstacle to providing these facilities in educational institutions. I will briefly describe how Schools can take advantage of Information technologies effectively and at low costs by the use of Open Source software as well as freely available resources on the internet. I will briefly give a small overview of some of the resources that schools will find extremely useful.

ITALC:

ITALC stands for Intelligent Teaching And Learning with Computers. iTALC is an extremely useful and powerful tool for teachers. The teacher can view each students desktop and monitor their activities. With the demo option facility the teachers desktop can be shown to all the students at the same time. Such a system can easily be implemented in a computer lab of a school in which all the PCs are networked.

Celestia:

This program is highly recommended for use in high school presentations, which can be set up to run through a pre-programmed sequence.
Celestia is a simulation of the known universe, based on current astronomical information. It includes beautifully rendered planets, moons, and some smaller orbital bodies such as International Space Station. Celestia is not limited to our solar system; you can visit other stars, or even travel outside the galaxy, and you will find models of extra-solar planets in orbit around remote stars. You have complete control over time and space, so you can view the stars from your chosen location and epoch. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft.
Besides Celestia there is also another similar software Stellarium which renders realistic skies in real time. With Stellarium, you really see what you can see with your eyes, binoculars or a small telescope.

Google Earth:

If you want to see an aerial view of the earth , this software is just right for you. It provides you with detailed high resolution satellite images of the earth. There is a facility for zooming into a particular place and you can get a view in which the streets as well as the traffic which is clearly visible. Google earth can be downloaded from Google Earth Download
A software similar to Google Earth is NASA World Wind .World Wind lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there. The latest version of World Wind makes it possible for us to get 3 dimensional views of Moon, Mars, Jupiter and Venus also besides Earth. Worldwind can be got from NASA Worldwind Download

Wikipedia:

Wikipedia is the worlds free encyclopedia and covers almost all the topics under the sun. It is available at Wikipedia. It offers a wealth of information for students and teachers alike. There are even a lot of pages on Goa. You can get to know quite a lot of information that includes History, Geography, climate, culture right down to the recently started FM radio stations and their frequencies.

How Stuff Works:

This site is dedicated to explaining how things work in a easy to understand manner with illustrations, animations, videos and descriptions. It covers all possible fields and categories from Ultrasound to Movie projectors, from Automobiles to Electronics. School students will find extremely useful information in the Geography, History as well as the Science section. You can check it out at How Stuff Works

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg has a huge collection of e-books which can be freely downloadable. The books cover a wide variety of topics from classics and children’s books to fiction and poetry. Even books on religion as well as Gardening and Home Science are available here. Students can make good use of almost all the classics of English literature available here. The site is Project Gutenberg.

Office Productivity Applications:

OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice is a full-featured office productivity suite, including a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation program, all in tightly integrated modules. Notable features in this version are native PDF and Flash export at a click and a macro recorder for increased productivity. You can create mail-merged documents from your Outlook or Mozilla address book, or other data sources.

GIMP
Gimp is a very flexible application that can be used for photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It supports a variety of file formats, languages and operating systems.

Inkscape
Inkscape is an open source vector drawing tool that uses the W3C standard scalable vector graphics format (SVG). Some supported SVG features include basic shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, and grouping.

Scribus
Scribus is an Open Source full featured Desktop Publishing application and brings professional page layout to desktops. Scribus has a modern and user friendly interface and supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.
Among other software in this category are 1) Dia, which is diagram software, it allows you to draws all sorts of technical drawings including flowcharts and circuit diagrams. 2)Tuxpaint which is a drawing program for children ages 3 to 12

Course Management and Online Learning

Moodle:
There are several online learning software such as Moodle which are suitable for courses conducted entirely online as well as for supplementing classroom Learning. Moodle has numerous features for site management, user management and course management. It has modules for assignment, quiz, discussion forum and chat. Instructors can put up assignments with due dates and maximum grades. There is a Flexible array of course activities available via various modules—Forums, Journals, Quizzes, Resources, Choices, Surveys, Assignments, Chats, Workshops.

General Purpose Content Management Systems - Joomla and Drupal:

Besides this there are also general purpose content management systems like Joomla and Drupal available where the schools can place their entire courseware and the students can access it whenever they want. A search facility is also available in such systems. Joomla is highly recommended due to its ease of use. Anyone with basic computer knowledge can easily maintain the site once it is setup. Joomla is available from Joomla Content Management System
The above are just a small fraction of the resources available which are just waiting for the users to discover and use them. All you need is a time to search for such resources and then try and evaluate them to see if they are suitable for your use.