[PLUG] Free Softwares for School

[Shantanoo Mahajan]

On 07-Jul-07, at 2:25 PM, Anand Kulkarni wrote:

> Hi,
>
> We are developing a 'Utility Softwares' CD for the
> school purpose. This CD is a collection of all free
> softwares useful for the school.
>
> We have thought of the following softwares to be
> added:
>
> PDF Reader (Acrobat)
> Office Automation (OpenOffice)
> ZIP software (7-ZIP)
> Devnagari Fonts and their keyboard maps
> Chat client
> Mozilla Firefox browser
> CD-Burning
> IPMsg
> Antivirus (ClamWin)
> Audacity (Sound Recording)
> JRE
>
>
> There could be many free and useful softwares
> available for the school purpose. If anybody knows any
> software please recommend. Only make sure that it is a
> free software i.e. freely distributable.
>
> Thanks.
> regards,
>
> Anand
> 9422515760(M)

Hi,
I would suggest following categorisation:
1] which help teaching
   - presentations (openoffice, kpresenter, ...)
   - learning management system (moodle.org, ..) [sudhanwa has  
suggested few more]

2] which are used for school adminstration
   - Library management system (koha, ...)
   - Finance related s/w (sql-ledger.org, gnucash, ...)
   - messaging solution (jabber, ircd, ...)
   - calendaring (opengroupware, zimbra,org, ...)
   - student assessment [Links suggested by Sudhanwa has few solution  
regarding this]

3] which are used for daily use by students and teachers
   - video player (vlc, mplayer, ...)
   - web browser (firefox, opera, flock, ..)
   - download utilities (wget, httrack, ...)
   - office suite (openoffice, koffice, ...)
   - MUA (thunderbird, kmail, mutt, ...)
   - PDF readers (xpdf, acroread, ...)
   - audio/video recording tools
   - printing/scaning tools and/or drivers for common devices
   - cd/dvd burining (cdrecord, k3b, ...)
   - chat clients (gaim, irssi, ...)
   - pdf generators (ghostscript, ...)
   - image viewers (generally one can use webbrowser)
   - image editing tools (gimp, ...)

4] development tools
   - compilers/linkers
   - scripting languages
   - UML s/w
   - flowcharts

5]  tools for managing infrastructure
   - network admin tools (ntop, mrtg, ...)
   - backup servers (do not have much expertise regarding free s/w in  
this domain)

6] helper software/utilities
   - jre
   - flash



In this, [4] is not much useful till 12th (my personal opinion from  
what I have seen)
You may have a look at http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/

regards,
shantanoo