Impro-Visor: a music notation tool

Music is part and parcel of education. Many people carry lots of songs on their mobile phone. Others go jogging with both ears having earphones attached. Maybe teachers and students would like to add more music to the school but sometimes you get one really great line or phrase for a song, but just can't get the rest. The Impro-Visor can help you finish your composition by suggesting improvisations and solos built on your theme. It's also a valuable educational tool for aspiring jazz musicians.

The objective is to improve understanding of solo construction and tune chord changes. There are other, secondary, things it can do, such as improvise on its own. It has also been used for transcription. Because rhythm-section (e.g. piano, bass, drums) accompaniment is automatically generated from chords, Impro-Visor can be used as a play-along device. Now having a wider array of accompaniment styles, its use is not limited to jazz.

It is free, open source and available for Windows, Linux and Mac. If you would like to download it, go here. Maybe you would like some tutorials. Other people might ask: with so many programs which deal with music, is there a place for another one? Well in this link, here the advantages of using Impro-Visor. Teacher who might query about its use in the classroom may visit this page.

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!

BibleTime

Some of our readers have asked about religious programs. I’m sure that all of them need the Bible. The Bible is one of the most widely read book of them all, and of all seasons. Surely the religion teacher/student can find all the necessary tools in the bible. Today we are presenting BibleTime which is a completely free Bible study program. It is built for Linux, Windows, FreeBSD and Mac OS X. BibleTime contains over 200 free Bible texts, commentaries, dictionaries and books, provided by the Crosswire Bible Society via the SWORD programming library.

If you need more information, you should go to its website.

Klavaro

We still remember the nostalgic sound of a typewriter. We used to take courses in order to learn how to use touch typing (ie focusing on the written note without looking at the keyboard layout!!). Nowadays most people do not take such courses….and then they complain because they need to type a few paragraphs, knowing that it will take a long time to type on the computer!

Not knowing what we used to call touch typing, makes the life of a teacher, student or parent quite miserable. Is there a program which might help in this area? Oh yes of course there is. Today we introduce Klavaro. It is available for Windows and Linux.

Klavaro is more than just a free touch typing tutor program. We felt like to do it because we became frustrated with the other options, which relied mostly on some few specific keyboards. Klavaro intends to be keyboard and language independent, saving memory, time and money!

In addition to the familiar "QWERTY" keyboard layout, it supports six other built-in layouts, or you can use the keyboard editor to create your own. It's also available for 25 different languages, making this a good choice for users. One can use it for a basic course or else use it for other purposes such as: fluidness test; velocity test; adaptability exercise; progress charts etc….

If one wants to download it, then go here. In this page there is also documentation and a forum, where users can look for further information or try to get an answer for their queries. If in need of graphical tutorials, then go here. 

 

Bleachbit - cleaning your pc, thoroughly!

It’s the day after Christmas. Most probably some of our readers are still happy with their new PC. They like how fast the system is. Others who are still using their old pc (ie old might mean just six months ago!), might get infuriated at how slow their computer is. Well, we visit thousands of websites, each one of them use cookies which are implanted in our pc. Some of them install tracking devices…...we might not notice, yet the speed gets slower all the time until it becomes unbearable!

We are proposing a free and open software – BleachBit. In fact when your computer is getting full, BleachBit quickly frees disk space. When your information is only your business, BleachBit guards your privacy. With BleachBit you can free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn't know was there. Designed for Linux, Mac and Windows systems, it wipes clean thousands of applications including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Adobe Flash, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari etc... Beyond simply deleting files, BleachBit includes advanced features such as shredding files to prevent recovery, wiping free disk space to hide traces of files deleted by other applications, and vacuuming Firefox to make it faster.

If you want to download the program, it is here. More details about the program is found here. Help will be readily available in the forum post.

Organizing photos

Who does not take photos nowadays? Nearly all the people, which includes both students and teachers. A photo says one million words. Consequently nobody says that it cannot be used for educational purposes. Obviously when one starts taking photos, the pc or mobile phone will soon be full of photos. How does one organize such collection?

Today we are presenting another open source and free program called digiKam. This program is available for Linux, Windows and Mac.

Besides making an album, one can manipulate photos according to one’s likes. One can simply use this program in a simple way or else go up to a professional level! With Digikam you can view, manage, edit, enhance, organize, tag, and share photographs. It is an advanced digital photo management application for KDE, which makes importing and organizing digital photos a "snap". The photos are organized in albums which can be sorted chronologically, by folder layout or by custom collections.

If you wish to download it, for windows go here; mac here; linux here. If you need some tutorials, then go here. Documentation is here. Enjoy playing with your photos!