Words, Images, and Sounds to tell interactive stories : all in Ren'py

Teachers and educators are all the time looking for ways and means to improve the delivery of their lessons. Today we are presenting a different answer. It’s Pen’Py.

Pen'Py is a visual novel engine – used by thousands of creators from around the world – that helps you use words, images, and sounds to tell interactive stories that run on computers and mobile devices. These can be both visual novels and life simulation games!

It should brighten up our language lessons! Students could be part and parcel of the story writing where they can show their talents and skills. If students were to take part, it won’t be boring, but quite interesting!

If one wants to go for documentation or to download it, one should go here;

You tube videos;

Examples of how it was used;

GoldenDict: a truly Golden Dictionary

It’s the not the first time that we receive a note from somebody which has mistakes. In today’s age, one can avoid that kind of embarrassment by checking one’s words with a good dictionary.

Today we proudly present GoldenDict: a feature-rich dictionary lookup program, supporting multiple dictionaries' formats, perfect article rendering with the complete markup, illustrations and other content retained, and allowing to type in words without any accents or correct case.

It supports multiple file formats. It has the ability to use arbitrary websites as dictionaries. It has the ability to index arbitrary directories with audio files for pronunciation look ups.

It has full Unicode case, diacritics, punctuation and white space folding. This means the ability to type in words without any accents, correct case, punctuation or spaces (e.g. typing 'Grussen' would yield 'grüßen' in German dictionaries).

It can pop up a small window with the translation of a word chosen from another application.

It is free and open software (GNU GPLv3+ license.)

One can download it from here. More written help is found here. YouTube tutorials are found here. 

Anki : Helping you to remember things!

We would like to help anybody who wants to memorise any type of content: students, parents and teachers.

Anki is a program which makes remembering things easy. Because it's a lot more efficient than traditional study methods, you can either greatly decrease your time spent studying, or greatly increase the amount you learn.

Anyone who needs to remember things in their daily life can benefit from Anki. Since it is content-agnostic and supports images, audio, videos and scientific markup (via LaTeX), the possibilities are endless.

For example:

• Learning a language
• Studying for medical and law exams
• Memorizing people's names and faces
• Brushing up on geography
• Mastering long poems
• Even practising guitar chords!

Besides, one can have several other features such as synchronization, flexibility, Media-Rich, Fully extensible and can handle decks of more than 100,000 cards!!

It is and open source and it can be used on any operating system!

If you want to download the program, please go here.

YouTube tutorials, please go here.

More tutorials are found here.

Forum where you can write about your challenges etc….go here.

Explore, create and collaborate website.

A few supporters of open source, do so because all products are free. We know that in some families, countries, schools etc….the financial limitations could inhibit students from advancing in their career. We would help any student who because of money problems, cannot study. We do so because we firmly believe that education is the best investor. It is the best guarantee for the future of our planet earth.

On the other hand, once one enjoys the services or products of the open source world, one realises that other people have worked for long, tedious hours in other to offer the final product. The open source is great not because the people participating are the best in the world. Yet the fact that everything is out in the open, anybody can participate, suggest, examine, change and/or rewrite. The propriety programs are made up of a very limited group of people. They never reveal how they built the program. The users are not allowed to tinker with the program. You are expected to pay and use it as the programmer intended when he/she started to code it.

The open source is not simply a provider of alternative programs. You are not expected to pay and obey! It encourages people to criticise and change the way a program works. In other words it needs people who are very active and do give their valid contribution.

In the education department we are aware that most teachers have never been introduced in the sharing aspect of the open source. Some teachers are too jealous to share their lessons worldwide. They always point out that some might take advantage of their valuable work.

Surprisingly one notes that they have become educators because others have chosen to share their information, knowledge, expertise etc....!

The educators’ role is not to be let by others but by trying to do one’s part in order to change the world! If the others are not following the rules or are behaving badly, the educator does not change his/her way of life!!

We are aware that the change in the mentality of the educators does not happen overnight! It won’t change just because of one article. Yet we do believe that the open source is giving a great helping hand in changing the behaviour of educators, students and parents. The more we share, the better the world will become.

One positive thought is that social networks have introduced an important aspect in our lives – that of sharing thoughts, photos, discussing material, opinions etc….Let’s hope that schools and educational institutions will build on this social feeling in order to enhance teaching!

Today we are presenting the explore, create and collaborate website. We leave it in your hands to get to know how to use it correctly without indicating any additional help (ie to learn how to collaborate with other people).

Kolibri: a free and open education for all

Education is very expensive. This is for many reasons: books, courses, tuition etc.. 
We've been offering open source material in order to make it possible for all to 
educate themselves. Today we are presenting Kolibri. Kolibri makes high quality 
education technology available in low-resource communities such as rural school, refugee camps, orphanages, non-formal school systems and prison systems. 

We print language learning books, distribute digital language learning materials, build tailor-made products, print smart notebooks and more; all our products are to inspire the teachers and students to achieve their potential in learning a foreign language. That’s what we care most. We produce an extensive range of top-notch educational materials including readers and activities, picture dictionaries, online learning materials in various sizes, formats, and color, as well as tailor-made products to meet the customized needs of students and teachers.

Kolibri installers, updates, and content can be downloaded once to a device in an area that has an Internet connection.

That "seeded" device can then share new content and updates with other devices over an offline local network.

To reach the most remote communities, a device can be carried by foot to share installers, updates, and content with other devices over local networks.

To facilitate broad, low-cost adoption, Kolibri is designed to run on as many devices and operating systems as possible, leveraging existing legacy hardware or low-cost off-the-shelf devices. This includes Windows, Linux and OSX. The cost of Android tablets is plummeting, so we're also building Kolibri to run standalone as an Android app.

We developed special processes to package online learning materials to be taken offline. One of our innovations is a video compression technique that convert the pen strokes and objects in a blackboard-style video into scalable vector objects. In our tests, a 250MB video can now be compressed into just a single megabyte, while retaining most of the original quality. This reduces the time and cost needed to download a large set of videos, and allows a large amount of content to be stored on a small, low-cost device.

Track educational growth for individuals and groups of learners accurately and easily, even in informal educational contexts. Kolibri comes with tools such as a coach dashboard, exam creation, exercises, assignment of content for differentiated instruction, and a recommendation tool that displays useful and relevant next steps based on a learner's history, progress and goals.

A Modular and Open Source Router is Being Crowdfunded

The router is the gateway for many people to the internet. We’re all in favour of open source. Most of the routers we find on the market are propriety. How about an open source one? There is a bunch of individuals who are trying to find funds for such project.

It’s important that we do support open source if we truly believe in freedom! It has been proved beyond any doubt that open source supports 100% freedom for its users. Other propriety programs and routers can’t guarantee that because they don’t disclose their code which might contain anything.

More people, after the Facebook scandal, are becoming aware of how many people are watching us behind our backs, registering every movement of our keyboard in order to sell that information to the first buyer!

Educating people is not simply helping them overcome exams, but first and foremost training them to be independent, in thought and action. Those choosing open source are the ones who are not afraid to learn new actions and practices for the sake of freedom of thought and expression. 

This router supports open VPN server. It has parental control features and an internet measuring tool. 

Let’s give a free world to the young people who are growing up today!

The link is found here.

If you need more information about other open source routers then go here. 

Free Resources: OpenStax

Time is precious. Today time has become more precious because we live in the age of buttons and the answer we’re looking for pops up in a split of a second.

When preparing lessons, tips, comments etc… about lessons, we notice that most educators simply repeat what others have been already doing for years. On the other hand, those who are responsible for resources are not in contact with the real learning situation of the class.

All these concerns can be diminished if something like openstax becomes more popular amongst teachers, parents and students. Finally they can adopt, edit and change the textbooks!!!

Openstax is 100% free. Any author can change the resources found according to his situation! There is no need to invent the wheel as there are already some resources which are commonly shared! They are written by professional content developers who are experts in their fields. Besides these resources undergo a rigorous peer review before becoming available for the general public. 

If one wants to know more just go to: openstax