Stellarium

It's incredible the number of open source products which could be used in class. One of them is Stellarium. Students need to view and access sources themselves. In this case stellarium proves to be a very good product. Students may view stars at the comfort of their homes.

In technical words it's a planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go.

You may download it from here. If you want to use it on your android mobile phone, download it from the google store. Mac/Windows users download it from here.

Free Mind - Mapping software

Teachers and/or students have experienced the so called difficult lessons. Both of them try to get the message across. Yet the student does not feel so confident that he or she has understood exactly what the teacher is trying to explain. On the other hand, students do not learn with the same method. Some students like visual explanations.

With this in mind, we are trying to focus on mapping. Mapping is an easy way to make difficult lessons easier. Other times it could be that the lesson is easy but it's not so easy for the student to understand the big picture. Here again mapping comes to the rescue.

One can use various colours or bubbles in order to make oneself understood better. It's a very good tool to be used for brainstorming before writing exercises. If you wish to download it, just click here. As usual its open source and it's available for linux, windows and mac computers. If you need more information just click on these links below: 

 

Link 1.

Link 2.

Link 3. (download)

Link 4. (video tutorial)