I am trying to expose my colleagues to great open source (or otherwise free) software. So far they use or have access to Moodle, Audacity, Sketchup, Google Earth, Tuxpaint, and of course Firefox. For web site maintenance we use Joomla! We have MS Office, so Open Office and friends are not really necessary. I have contemplated exposing them to The Gimp, or Gimpshop, but for most elementary classrooms that would be primarily a teacher tool.

I am looking for tools that would be especially good to use with elementary students. What other great classroom tools should I share with them?

Tags: elementary, open, oss, software, source

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More than 16 added. I believe I got all most apps and web services mentioned in reply to this post... see listing above for the link.

An highlight, TVnima. This is an online Realtime 3D application that allows anyone to create a TV news program using their personal media (photos, images, videos). Has anyone tried that?
Wow! What a great resource link you have! I will be sending this link to all my fellow student teachers!!!
I have several teachers that are using which is an awesome site for students to talk about what they are learning. All you do is create an account with individual student profiles, and then upload a picture. The students then can leave voice and textual comments about that picture or subject. The contact can be moderated as well, so it is safe to allow comments. Check out what we are doing with voicethread in our school, and . Let me know what you think of these ideas. Thanks
Did the links get missing? If you enclose each link between "<" characters, which is usual in emails, the link doesn't appear. Would it be voicethread that you refer to? The links to your school usage got lost as well. Simply paste the url, without any extra character or tag if you have any problem with this.
A very complete 3 parts article that offers reviews of web 2.0 software to use in Class Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0: Part 1

I know, I know, this is not strictly speaking open source. But most of them are free to use.
I suppose you have already explored pbwiki and wikispaces.com. But have you tried Voicethread -- a wonderful podcasting-like audio recording tool? You might also consider Trackstar for webquests.
I teach at a middle school and recently did a district workshop on some of the software that's available out there:
http://www.180techtips.com/awesometech/index.htm
Hi, My students really like PhotoStory. Great tool to help them start their writing, especially descriptive writing. We also do a lot of pod casting using audacity. Especially like Picasa for combining short video clips into one long movie. Glad I stumbled upon this site. Anyone interested in using Skype with a 4th grade class this next year?
Thanks for all the great ideas and links everyone!

I'm launching a new e-learning course (http://www.glyndwr.ac.uk/en/Coursesfees/Postgraduate/PostgraduateCe...) and was putting together a list of essential (hopefully free) software for the students to use. I'd got the usual things - pdf reader, audacity, VLC media player, Open Office, Wink etc. but there some great suggestions here that I need to explore.

:-) Thanks again

Clive
Most teachers would definitely love PIVOT!!!!!!!!!! It is a stickman animation program!
Talking of Open Source Software, I wanted to point this community to an article titled 'Introducing your child to Linux' authored by an active and well-respected member of the Classroom 2.0 community :) In addition to links to several linux-based software tools for kids in the article itself, the comments section has ideas for kid-friendly F/OSS software shared by parent readers of SmartBean.

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