Ade Malsasa Akbar contact
Senior author, Open Source enthusiast.
Saturday, May 23, 2020 at 23:19

Let me share with you my Ubuntu tips for teaching and studying you could practice easily at school. Of course these tips are based more on free/libre open source software principles so you will see alternatives like PeerTube among mentioned tools. However, all software mentioned below are Free Software exclusively and available in 20.04 Focal Fossa. I hope websites other than UbuntuBuzz follow by exposing Ubuntu education capability like this. Happy studying!


(A six minute video featuring education tools on Focal - among them LibreOffice and Kazam | this video is downloadable, hosted at peertube)
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For Teacher


Items with (*) are accessible with web browser.  For the user manuals, see last section.

Teaching Tools:
  • Screenkey - keyboard live typing indicator. Good for teaching through videos as the viewer see on screen everything you type.
  • Jitsi (*) - video call and conferencing, alternative to Zoom, easy to use for everyone without registration and without app installation.
  • Kazam - screencasting tool alternative to Camtasia, but easier to use.
  • Ethercalc (*) - online spreadsheet, alternative to Gafam's one, useful for example to record your students attendances or similar things.
  • PeerTube - video sharing platform, alternative to YouTube, which your students can download every content from. The cool video above is uploaded at PeerTube!
  • Shutter - professional screenshot tool. I use this to annotate all my screenshots in UbuntuBuzz as well as in my course.
  • Texmaker - a very good LaTeX editor with preview feature and easy for beginners.
  • GNS3 - computer networking simulator, a free software replacement to Cisco Packet Tracer.
  • Kdenlive - decent video editing tool.

(Picture 1.1: my Ubuntu computer when I teach my student - it is a course to learn GNU/Linux basics via Telegram for file sharing and Jitsi for video conference so teacher can see student's screen)

Settings:
  • Website block - use this to block certain websites in a certain period of time in students computers.
  • Classroom management - Veyon (formerly iTALC) is a central monitor application of all computers in a classroom which can work with Ubuntu and Windows. This is very interesting for schools which have not implemented classroom management yet.

For Students


Studying tools:
  • File Manager - to access all your files and storage drives.
  • LibreOffice Writer - your Word. Make sure to save as Open Document Format and ask others to do the same. To print out, export as pdf first and print out that pdf instead.
  • LibreOffice Calc - your Excel. It can edit xlsx spreadsheets and save as pdf.
  • LibreOffice Impress - your PowerPoint. It can edit pptx presentations and save as pdf as well. For you seeking for examples, let me share with you all my presentations I use to teach online.
  • Inkscape - your drawing and picture editor application.
  • StarDict - for non-english students here is desktop dictionary application that support so many languages. In Indonesia, I taught my students to install this as their Indonesian<>English dictionary.
  • Zotero - the best reference/bibliography manager, alternative to Mendeley, which can be integrated well to Mozilla Firefox and LibreOffice. 
For user manuals, see last section too.

(Picture 2.1: file manager browsing my teaching materials and ebooks that my students studying)


User Guides


I have made a lot of tutorials for the aforementioned tools:
  • Jitsi - step by step in how to make your first video call.
  • LibreOffice Writer - guide to make your documents and macros, see the LibreOffice section there.
  • Kazam - how to record your screen as video including your voice.
  • Screenkey - how to install and use on-screen keystroke indicator.
  • Zotero - all UbuntuBuzz's tutorials on the bibliography manager including the integrations.
  • StarDict - its features, and, how to install the desktop dictionary.
 (Picture 3.1: Kazam is a simplest tool to make screencast on Ubuntu with clear video and voice results and just click to use it | It outputs into mp4, ogv, mkv, and webm formats)

Happy studying!


This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.