K12 Courses

Power Publishing - Three for free

Power Publishing course

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Download course: powerpublishing.zip

Three open source graphics and desktop publishing tools are free to use and redistribute. Learn to use them in this self-guided set of tutorials created with Moodle. (Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus)

All three of these programs are free to use and redistribute. You may download them and install them on as many computers as you like and you are encouraged to make copies and give them to friends, family and students.

TeachersDomain.org Open Education Resources

This is a good collection of multimedia published under an open license that lets you republish and remix. These videos would be great for student presentations. The site is funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Open Education Resources>

INGOTS - OpenOffice Getting Started Guide

ingots handbook imageINGOTS (international grades in office technology) is a certificate program designed to promote assessment of the technical skills needed to operate popular office software. The program offers ingots (bronze, silver, gold, platinum) for achievement in an increasingly rigorous program for students learning office suite skills. The Ingots resource page lists several products that are freely available for download and licensed under the Creative Commons license.

Getting Started Guide free download (pdf)
Writer Guide free download (pdf)
Draw Guide free download (pdf)
Migration Guide free download (pdf)

The INGOTS program offers training for assessors and schools participate as INGOTS Academies. For more information see the INGOTS FAQ.

The ChemCollective.org

The ChemCollective.org – Online Resources for Teaching and Learning Chemistry.

“The Chemistry Collective project is currently funded by the National Science Foundation, so our software is available free of charge to all educators and students. You and your students can use it on the web immediately without any licensing requirements.”

Many useful resources including the JAVA Chemistry Lab. There are resources for students and teachers. This site promotes the creating and adaptation of lessons. They even have a Murder Mystery for your class to solve.

Inkscape - Vector Graphics Tutorials

Inkscape is an open source drawing tool with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, and CorelDraw that uses the W3C standard scalable vector graphics format (SVG).

Inkscape comes with a full set of tutorials right in the "Help" menu. Here are links to the tutorials in HTML form but you'll want to use the ones in the program for teaching as they are interactive. These seven tutorials should get you off to a good start with your classes.

  1. Basic tutorial
  2. Advanced tutorial

OpenOffice.org 2.0 Tutorials

Digital Distribution created nine great, flash based OpenOffice 2.0 tutorials. It looks like their project is shutting down but because they published the tutorials under the Creative Commons License, we are free to redistribute the tutorials. See the bottom of this page for links to some other OpenOffice tutorials. You can download the latest version of OpenOffice from OpenOffice.org



Writer part 1

Writer part 1

Writer part 2

Digital Photography

Digital Photography and the GIMP

http://oregonphotoblog.org/gimp



Your computer is your darkroom.
Your software is free.
The world is your gallery.

Description:

On-line digital photography course. Suitable for a one-term, high school class. Short lessons on art history, photo technique and using the GIMP. Classes may also publish their work on OregonPhotoBlog.org.

1. Portraits
2. Texture - Lines - Pattern
3. Color - Light
4. Still Life
5. Macro
6. Landscape - Panoramic
7. Clones
8. Photo Essays