Free Stuff

"For education, free software makes it possible to teach everything using computer tools: art, science, maths, computer science, music, you name it."
Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Ubuntu

This pretty much sums it up nicely. For just about any software you could need to use in education there is a free alternative. I will not try to explain at length what "Free" means when used in Free and Open Source or FLOSS as others have done so many times and occasionally quite eloquently. Suffice it to say that Free, when used this way does not always mean free of charge but free to use or modify as you see fit as long as you comply with the license such as the GPL, LGPL, BSD etc.

Today I am going to start with the extremely and almost painfully obvious for those of us involved in open source advocacy. OpenOffice.org

Alas, many educators know nothing about this very powerful and free office suite. I teach in a prison 4 days every week so that offenders can have real, marketable job skills when they are released back into society and don't return to a life of crime and ultimately, incarceration in a revolving door cycle. Almost universally they face serious financial hardship when they first get out and I always give them a copy of Openoffice.org that they can use since they would not be able to afford a legitimately licensed copy of a Microsoft suite.
OpenOffice as it is usually called, even though the proper name includes the .org contains:

* Word processing
* Spreadsheets
* Presentations
* Graphics
* Databases

It is also fully compatible with MS Office and is even able to use the new file types that were implemented in Office 2007.

There is a very small learning curve as well. If someone has any experience with an office suite, then they will be able to use OpenOffice.