How about fixing an appointment with a large number of students?

Teaching, like most jobs today, involves meetings. Now sometimes one has an idea during the weekend (or festive holidays), and wants to share it with colleagues or students. How can one involve a large number of students about ideas, polls or an appointment?

Today we're presenting Dudle which is an online scheduling application, which is free and open source and consequently available for all platforms. The user is able to schedule meetings or make small online polls. There is no e-mail collection as in other programs. In fact this is one of the reasons why we are all in favour of not only free programs, but open source too as one can check the source code. Besides one can alter the program at will, with no law breaking accusations.

If one wants to download it, one must visit here. Examples are found here. If one wants to customize, it’s here. If one wants to change the source code, one needs to go here. 

 

Recoll: seraching for files or quotations inside files.

How many times teachers and students would like to remember where they have put an important quotation? How would you find it in a computer full of files? Is a computer capable to look inside your files? Would you find it in time for your latest paper/project etc…?

Today we’re presenting Recoll, which is a full text search QT based free, open source program especially made for Unix-like and Linux but it is also available for Windows and Mac systems, licensed under GPL. It provides efficient desktop full text search from single-word to arbitrarily complex boolean searches, basically it indexes the documents data (along with their compressed versions) and huge number of files then let you find quickly whatever you search for. Recoll updates its index at designed intervals (for example through Cron tasks) but if desired, the indexing task can run as a file-system monitoring daemon for real-time index updates.

The Recoll document conversion and text extraction architecture makes it extremely easy to write new filters, and many document types are supported. Indexes the contents of many document types: text, HTML, E-Mail stores of all kinds, OpenOffice.org, Microsoft Office and Office Open XML, AbiWord, KWord, Gaim, Lyx, Scribus, PDF, WordPerfect, PostScript, RTF, TeX, DVI, DjVu, MP3 and other audio file formats, JPEG and other image file formats.

The following web pages are available if you wish to download; or look for documentation; or screenshots. Enjoy!