Bromley ICT Forum Blog

Interested in free software to support your school curriculum program?

Below is a comprehensive list of free software resources for teachers. (Thanks to Alison Tanner from Darrick Wood School for this entry).  Are any of you making use of these programs? Do they work well? Share some of your thoughts in the comments area.. 

OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute.
http://www.openoffice.org/

AVG Free Edition is for private, non-commercial, single-home computer use only.
http://free.grisoft.com/

Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

CDBurnerXP Pro is a free CD/DVD burning solution.With this software you can burn CD-R, CD-RW DVD+R/RW DVD-R/RW discs. All features in detail you can read on the features page.
http://www.cdburnerxp.se/

Nvu - A complete Web Authoring System for Linux desktop users as well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. Nvu (which stands for “new view”) makes managing a web site a snap. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML.
http://www.nvu.com/

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X
http://www.inkscape.org/

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.
http://www.gimp.org/

7-Zip is a free file archiver with high compression ratio.
http://www.7-zip.org/

CamStudio is free screen capture software. It will record all the actions you do on your screen on your computer as a video file.
http://www.camstudio.org/

Google Sketchup is a 3D program that will allow you to create most 3D objects. It has video tutorials (website) and works well in conjunction with Google Earth
http://www.sketchup.com/