One of the biggest issues any teacher will tell out about though is finding good resources.  It’s bad enough that schemes of work, lesson plans, individual learning plans and assessment and evaluation sessions take up all of your time.  To find the time to locate quality teaching resources on top of all this is extremely difficult indeed.  This is why most teachers are resource hogs who will always try to get copies of resource libraries from other teachers whenever there’s a meeting or a training event.

Now though, Google has stepped into the fold with that can only be described as a godsend.  They’ve launched a special YouTube Schools website where they’ve aggregated thousands of hours of video content and filtered out all the “distracting” stuff.

The content is filtered into 400 playlists, with more to follow, on subjects including mathematics, English, social studies and more.  All of this is then filtered again into age groups.

In a press release, Brian Truong, YouTube’s project manager said…

We’ve been hearing from teachers that they want to use the vast array of educational videos on YouTube in their classrooms, but are concerned that students will be distracted by the latest music video or cute cat, or a video that wasn’t appropriate for students.

While schools that restrict access to YouTube may solve this distraction concern, they also limit access to hundreds of thousands of educational videos on YouTube that could help bring photosynthesis to life, or show what life was like in ancient Greece.

To make matters even better for educational establishments of all varieties the YouTube for Schools programme can divert all YouTube traffic from their establishment direct to the new site.  This means that students can only use YouTube to watch educational videos, rather than being distracted by the latest Beyonce video.  This site says it…

…gives you access to the hundreds of thousands of educational videos on YouTube EDU. This includes short lessons from top teachers around the world, full courses from the world’s best universities, professional development from fellow educators and inspiring videos from thought leaders.

The new system allows schools and educational establishments that sign up to customise the content to suit their own needs with teachers and systems administrators able to create custom playlists for students to match and suit individual differences in curriculum.

If you’re not a teacher you probably won’t get just how much of a big deal this launch is, trust me when I say that it’s positively huge and will save teachers worldwide hundreds of hours of fruitless searching for content and having to watch dozens of long videos before finding something suitable for a lesson in class.  Finally the peace of mind that comes with students not being able to look at “Cat playing with iPad” again is worth its weight in platinum.

Now I’m a teacher by my first trade, and a tech author second.  I’ve been spending the last few years teaching Literacy and Numeracy to the long-term unemployed who need better skills and qualifications in order to be able to get back into the workplace, or to those people who are already employed and need qualifications to progress their careers.  I’m very interested then in the use of technology as an educational aid and, if you’re interested, you can read an essay I wrote on the subject for my teaching qualification here where I talked about some of the issues and barriers for the use of technology in the classroom, including the legal, physical and mental barriers that some people need to overcome.

It’s always with great interest then that I read news stories about how the latest technology is being used in classrooms.  In the last year I’ve seen schools, mostly in the US, giving iPads to each student and writing custom apps for the platform to help improve learning in class; one particularly interesting app was using the tablet’s accelerometer with a special app that helped the students simulate earthquakes.  I’ve also seen the use of videoconferencing to enable schools to share teachers with specific expertise and to bring in experts from the worlds of business, science and society.

Why is it then, six years after the launch of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project that intended to create laptops for developing countries for only $99 that we don’t have schools rolling out laptops, netbooks or tablets to their students every year?  From the perspective of the technology companies this is an enormous market and opportunity; indeed Bloomberg are reporting today that Apple are bidding to sell 15 million iPads to schools in Turkey.

The single biggest barrier however is still price.  In order to make mobile devices that will appeal to the consumer and trample upon the competition, companies are still going for quality, brushed metals, high quality plastics and IPS panel screens.  What they’re not focusing on is the schools and colleges mass market where what’s required is ruggedness and affordability; after all these machines will be designed to only be used in educational establishments for their purposes.

Next week does see the launch of a new affordable Android tablet, the affectionately named (for anyone of a certain age in the UK anyway) AndyPad.  Starting at just £129 this is finally approaching the price levels that technology needs to be at to appeal to the huge volumes and limited budgets of schools worldwide, and of course some of the money can be saved elsewhere in providing cheaper eBooks instead of the traditional paper copies (while being more environmentally friendly into the bargain).

The fact remains though that back in 2005 when Nicholas Negroponte announced his plans to create a $99 educational laptop for the developing world the whole world got very excited.  Then companies like Microsoft decided that they wanted a piece of the action, muscled in and muddied the whole situation.  Now we don’t have any $99 laptops and there’s no immediate prospect that this will change.

It’s worth noting that some smaller companies have tried to release $99 tablets, certainly here in the UK, and all have so far been rubbish.  What must be needed then is the technological know-how and the manufacturing clout of a big name player.  Could Apple make a $99 iPad?  The company certainly makes enough money to subsidise such a device and it would sell in enormous volumes.  How economical that would be to a company with shareholders to pay though is up to Apple’s board to decide.

So I find it a pity that in what might turn out to be the ‘golden age’ of mobile computing that children are still being left out, especially the millions of them on low household incomes who still don’t have a computer at home.  It’s time I think for the technology companies to step up to this challenge and prove that $99 can still be achieved for the benefit of everyone.

There are few tools so highly in tune with the needs of students. But is Uberstudent the right tool to aid you in the quest for your higher education? Let’s take a look and find out.

Features

Features? You want features? How about the following snippet from the toolset Uberstudent includes:

• Education-specific take on the Firefox browser.
• Zotero research tool.
• LyX document processing tool that enables you to concentrate on content.
• Virtual Understanding Environment concept and content mapping tool.
• Top shelf for keeping track of your working files.
• Buddi finance management.
• Keepnote for class notes.
• Plenty of document templates.
• ThinkingRock, a visual planner.
• Beagle for quick searching of your files.
• Ardesial for writing directly over OpenOffice presentations.

and much, much more. So much so, you could easily spend days taking your initial look at all the available tools.

Education

There is a menu, under the Applications menu, called Education. Within that menu you will find six sub-menus:

• Books: Here you will find tools for managing eBooks as well as links to web sites selling cheap (or rental) textboks.
• Research and Writing: Here you will find nearly every tool you can think of to aid you in the process of research and writing. From Document writing to notes, to different incarnations of Firefox to the Mendeley Desktop (keeps track of all your PDFs and research papers).
• Self-Management: Keep track of your finances, social networking, time, and tasks.
• Study Aids: Here you will find flash card tools, dictionaries, thesaurus, and much more.
• Subjects: Help with Math and the ability to browse educational software by subject (not yet implimented).
• Utilities: Translators, stopwatch, lecture tools, schedulers, more note tools, resume builder, and more.

Browsers

Uberstudent comes with two browsers: Firefox and Chrome. The Firefox included with Uberstudent has been fine-tuned to aid you in your quest for education, which means you will be using it for specific needs. It includes the Zotero add-in which helps you collect, manage, and cite your work. All default bookmarks in Firefox are geared towards learning as well.  In the Browsers menu you will also find a Firefox cheatsheet which includes keyboard and mouse shortcuts to make your Firefox experience more efficient. You will need this as there have been so many enhancements to Firefox. For regular, every day browsing, Uberstudent includes Chrome without any specific enhancements.

Final thoughts

If you are looking for an operating system perfect for the higher education environment, look no further than Uberstudent. This distribution of Linux contains so many education-specific tools you will be spending your first days with it just marveling at what the developers have packed into one single operating system…and nearly every single tool specific to helping you achieve your goal of graduation. With school about ready to reconvene, I highly recommend you give this take on Linux a try. Your education will thank you for it.

The computers were installed as holes in the wall, much in the way people would expect to find a cashpoint, and children quickly learned to teach themselves and then began to pass that knowledge on to others.

“I think we have stumbled across a self-organising system with learning as an emergent behaviour,” said Professor Sugata Mirta of Newcastle University in the UK, at the TED Global (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference.  He said that follow-up experiments suggest that children around the world can learn complex tasks quickly, and with little supervision.

“The children barely went to school, they didn’t know any English, they had never seen a computer before and they didn’t know what the internet was.”  The children quickly figured out how to use the computers and access the internet.  “I repeated the experiment across India and noticed that children will learn to do what they want to learn to do.”

“At the end of it we concluded that groups of children can lean to use computers on their own irrespective of who or where they are,” he said.

Professor Mirta has now formalised lessons from his experiments and has come up with the new concept of SOLE (Self Organised Learning Environments).  These consist of a computer on a bench large enough for four children to sit around it.  He said the learning doesn’t really take place when you give a child their own computer.

He has tested the spaces in the UK and Italy, with similar results, and now believes it should be tested more widely.

What exactly is OpenSuSE Education?

This distribution is exactly what you would think it is – a Linux distribution geared specifically for educational environments. But it does take it a bit further than that. Not only does OpenSuSE Edu contain a large amount of software for schools (for both the classroom and the administrative sides) it also extends to the home user adding content filtering and tools students need to complete their work.

OpenSuSE edu is supported by the OpenSuSE project and benefits from all of the outstanding work going into OpenSuSE. Now let’s take a look at some of the applications that make OpenSuSE Edu special.

Desktop

What might surprise you is the vast amount of applications that are installed on the live CD. Naturally some of this software is not geared specifically for educational institutions, but you will be surprised at how much is. Let’s take a look at the highlights. These applications are above and beyond the standard Linux installation. OpenSuSE Edu contains all of the standard applications as well.

• Brain Workshop: Mental exercises.
• Cr. Geo: Interactive geometry
• Euler Math Toolbox: A powerful, versatile, mature software for numerical and symbolic computations.
• i GNU it: Flashcard trainer.
• iTest: On-line testing.
• Chemtool: Chemstry toolset.
• GCompris: Educational Suite.
• gElemental: Periodic table.
• iTALC: View and remote control desktops.
• KSeg: Explore geometric constructions.
• KSimus: Network simulator.
• Multiplication Station: Mathematical games.
• QCad: 2D CAD
• Tux Math: Educational math game

Server

Now let’s take a look at what OpenSuSE Edu offers on the server/administrative end. You will not find all of these softwares on the Live CD as some of these tools are far more complex to run on a Live CD.

• iTest Server: Server side of iTest testing tool.
• iTALC Server: Server side of iTALC
• Moodle: Course management system.
• OpenSIS: Student Information System.
• OpenBiblio: Library system.
• FreeSMS: Managing educational facility.
• ATutor: Web-based learning center.

And much more.

What does it look like?

Figure 1

As you can see (in Figure 1), the OpenSuSE Education distribution looks fairly similar to the standard OpenSuSE distribution.

If you click on the more applications you will see what I mean about the amount of software installed.

How does it run?

OpenSuSE is one of the finer Linux distributions. It’s smooth, fast, solid benefits from the SuSE distribution owned and supported by Novell. And once installed OpenSuSE Edu runs as well as any Linux distributions. Installing this distribution, however, isn’t quite as smooth. In fact, installing this distribution takes a surprisingly long time. I understand why – there is so much software to install. But at some point (during the installation) you are going to wonder if something has gone wrong. Let the installation continue…it’s just slow.

Final thoughts

It’s a breath of fresh air to see a distribution singling out the educational institutions. This is exactly what schools need. Now the hardest part is making those schools aware of its existence. If OpenSuSE Edu can tackle that, they will have a huge success on their hands.

iTALC has a clean interface, is not insanely difficult to set up, works beautifully, and is FREE (both in cost and in source). With iTALC you can see what is going on in your classroom in overview mode, remote-control a PC, show a demo, lock workstations, send messages to students, power on/off machines, login/logout students. In this tutorial I am going to show you how to get iTALC up and running on two Ubuntu 9.10 machines. From that you should be able to re-create the steps to have an entire classroom working.

Installation

Most of the dependencies should already be met on your Ubuntu machine. If not, what you need is:

• libqt4-dev
• xorg-dev
• libxtst-dev
• libjpeg62-dev/libjpeg-devel
• zlib1g-dev/zlib-devl
• libssl-dev/openssl-devel

You will also need and ssh client and server running to transfer keys during setup.

The first installation we will do is the Master. The Master is the teacher machine. For this fire up Synaptic, search for “italc” (no quotes), select italc-master for installation, and click Apply to install. You could also just open up a terminal window and issue the command:

sudo apt-get install italc-master

Now go to the student machine and do the same thing, only this time you will be installing italc-client. You can do this with Synaptic or from the command line with:

sudo apt-get install italc-client

Once both softwares are installed you are ready to start the configuration.

Configuration

The first thing you need to do is on the client machine configure the iTALC client daemon (ica) to run upon boot. You have to run this so users can not kill the daemon. To do this issue the command:

sudo gedit /etc/gdm/Init/Default /etc/gdm/PreSession/Default

This will open up two files in gedit. You need to add, near the top of both files:

killall ica &

/usr/bin/ica &

Once you have done this, log out and log back in to the machine. Now it is time to set up authentication.

Keys

Of course you have to add authentication, in order for the Master to get to the clients. To do this, go to the Master machine and issue the command:

ica -role teacher -createkeypair

The above command will create a keypair in /etc/italc/keys. What you need to now do is copy these keys to the client machine using scp like so:

scp -r /etc/italc/keys USERNAME@IP_ADDRESS:/tmp

Where USERNAME is the username on the client and IP_ADDRESS is the address of the client machine.

Once this directory is on the client machine, move to the client machine and issue the following commands:

sudo rm -rf /etc/italc/keys

sudo mv /tmp/keys /etc/italc/

You are now ready to fire up iTALC.

Using iTALC

On the Master machine you will need to make sure iac is running before you fire up the Master Control. So open up a terminal window and issue the command:

ica &

Now that the daemon is running, issue the command:

italc

Figure 1

The Master Control tool will open (see Figure 1), only you will not have any classrooms or computers added.

The first thing you need to do is add a Classroom and then a Computer. To do this right click the left pane and select Add Classroom. Give the Classroom a name. Now add a computer by right clicking the same location and selecting Add Computer. When this new window opens (see Figure 2) you need to add the IP/Hostname, Name (such as student name or workstation name/number), select a Classroom for this machine, and set it as a Student computer in the Type drop-down. Click OK to finalize this addition.

That new computer will show up in the main Pane as a thumbnail of what is currently happening on the desktop of that machine. If you right-click that thumbnail you will get a menu of all of the actions you can take on that machine. It’s quite simple to take over a workstation this way.

When you do take over (or just view) a workstation, iTALC will go into full-screen mode. If you want to switch to windowed mode you can bring the icon bar back by holding your mouse at the top edge of your screen and then click the Windowed icon.

Final thoughts

iTALC is an incredibly powerful tool that can be used by teachers of all kinds. Take advantage of this tool in your classroom to make your job much easier.

The Open CourseWare Movement allows students to find courses online that fit their needs. Because of the large amount of schools currently serving free online classes, students can choose from literally thousands of courses. These aren’t just your every day, run of the mill colleges either! Universities such as MIT, Yale, and Stanford are among those that offer free courses online. Even colleges and universities in different countries such as Japan, Israel, and Spain are participating in the program. Because of this, many courses are offered in languages other than English.

For a college to qualify for the Open CourseWare program, they must offer at least 10 courses free online. The courses must contain everything a student needs, including the reading material (students who use this don’t have to pay for books) for it to be a part of the program. Whether it’s a class taken for fun or to learn something new, it’s a good idea for students to look for classes from universities known particularly for that course or major. This helps ensure that the student will get the best education they can. Different courses are taught in different ways. Many courses have video lectures, just audio, or just course transcripts. It’s important for those looking to take a class through the Open CourseWare program to look for classes that fit their needs such as a video class for those who learn better visually than by reading.

The goal of the Open CourseWare Movement is to get as many colleges and universities to participate as possible so that more people are given the chance to learn online. There are many ways that those who’ve benefited from the Open CourseWare Movement can help such as donating, passing on the word, or just taking a course to better themselves. It is usually a good idea to open a search engine and search for “open courseware” to find universities and colleges that offer these free courses.

In the early days, the only way a student could find a cheaper textbook was to buy a used copy from someone who had taken the same course earlier. Now, with the internet, you can search for textbooks online and buy them from the online store. However, if you want to score a good deal, it’s best to use a service like Campusbooks.

For people who have no time to scour multiple websites or don’t know all the resources for buying textbooks online, Campusbooks is extremely helpful. When you look for a book, the site searches multiple sites like Amazon, AbeBooks, eBay, and other similar sites. Then, the search results are neatly displayed so you can check whatever interests you. Once you select a book, you are directed to the online store to make the payment.

Users can search for a book by name, author, keyword, or ISBN number. Additionally, they can browse by category. When search results are displayed, a summary of the lowest prices is shown first. The next two sections in the results page are the lowest prices for new books and used ones. Search results include international editions as well, which are often cheaper than books in the US. A search for a biochemistry book showed a 100$ price difference between the US and the international versions.

Campusbooks has a lot of other services. Users can sell their old textbooks to other sites or go one step further and donate textbooks. The site also offers to alert a user when the book he’s looking for becomes available at a particular price. With Campusbooks, it’s easier to find the cheapest textbooks available.

Have you ever used Campusbooks? What do you think of this service? What other sites do you know of to get textbooks and other school supplies cheap? Let me know in the comments.