Open source or free design and development tools

In our recent work in reviewing school ICT infrastructure, one of the common questions has been about the free or open source applications that are available for teaching design and development. Some teachers have the view that they need to use 'Industry Standard' software like Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver, but site licensing for these applications can take a large chunk out of a school budget.

It is our view that the teaching of concepts is more important than training in specific applications. As an employer of web developers ourselves, it is more important to us to find somebody with a good understanding of web development concepts, and an ability to quickly pick up and learn any software tools they need for the job, rather than somebody who "knows how to use Dreamweaver".

So, we thought it would be interstesting to find out if any schools are currently using free or open source software as an alternative to the Abobe suite of tools. As a quick way of doing this we asked members of the MLE list to complete a short survey. There were only nine respondents, but they did provide a range of tools that are currently in use in New Zealand schools. This list is summarised below. It is purely a list of what some school's are currently using, and no attempt has been made to evaluate how effective or appropriate they are.

The next step we would like to undertake, time permitting, is to find out the percentage of schools using the applications below. It would also be useful at some stage to survey industry and find out their perspective on the need for students to be 'trained' in Adobe applications at secondary level.

Art/Design/Photo Editing/Drawing

• GIMP http://www.gimp.org/
• Inkscape http://www.inkscape.org/
• Scribus http://www.scribus.net/
• Open Office Draw http://www.openoffice.org/product/draw.html
• Tux Paint http://www.tuxpaint.org/
• Dia http://projects.gnome.org/dia/
• Sketchup http://sketchup.google.com/
• Blender http://www.blender.org/
• Scupltirs http://www.sculptris.com/
• Picnik http://www.picnik.com/
• Paint.Net http://www.getpaint.net/

Web Development/Programming

• Kompozer http://www.kompozer.net/
• Scratch http://scratch.mit.edu/
• Notepad++ http://notepad-plus-plus.org/
• Eclipse http://www.eclipse.org/
• Alice http://www.alice.org/
• BlueJ http://www.bluej.org/
• Gambas http://gambas.sourceforge.net/
• Komodo http://www.activestate.com/komodo-ide
• Gedit http://projects.gnome.org/gedit/
• Gamemaker Lite http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker/
• Visual Studio Express http://www.microsoft.com/express/