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A “Leguino” educational hacker kit launching on Kickstarter lets you extend Lego projects with Lego form-factor gears, motors, displays, sensors, and breadboards, controlled by a “Visuino” GUI dev environment running on an Arduino or RPi Zero W.

I'm always on the lookout for open source software that works well in educational settings. Recently I decided to check out Endless OS, a lightweight, Linux-based operating system with a customized desktop environment forked from GNOME 3.

News briefs for February 28, 2018. in Android Education IOT Mobile News open source Purism Red Hat Security Ubuntu.

The open educational resources (OER) movement has been gaining momentum over the past few years, as educators—from kindergarten classes to graduate schools—turn to free and open source educational content to counter the high cost of textbooks.

It's nearly impossible to enter a school these days without seeing an abundance of technology. Despite this influx of computers into education, funding inequity forces school systems to make difficult choices. Some educators see things as they are and wonder, "Why?" while others see problems as opportunities and think, "Why not?" Andrew Dobbie is one of those visionaries who saw his love of Linux and computer reimaging as a unique learning opportunity for his students. read more

It is no secret that American schools have struggled to prepare students for the jobs of today and tomorrow. Critics have blamed schools' shortcomings on a variety of factors: change-resistant bureaucracy, low standards, straying too far from the Three R's, inadequate teacher training, and more. One potential root cause of this fundamental issue is that the education system isn't built to be responsive to a rapidly changing environment. read more

Minimal Linux Live is a tiny educational Linux distribution, which is designed to be built from scratch by using a collection of automated shell scripts.

Bodhi-based, educational-oriented Escuelas Linux GNU/Linux distribution has been updated today to version 5.6, as developer Alejandro Diaz informed us a few moments ago.

Located in a sleepy village just two hours away from the bustling metropolis of Mumbai is a school that defies traditional educational models by collaboratively owning, building, and sharing knowledge and technology. The school uses only open source software and hardware in its approach to learning, and takes pride in the fact that none of its students have used or even seen proprietary software, including the ubiquitous Windows operating system.

Openness (from open source software, to open hardware, to open principles) is changing the paradigm of education. So, to celebrate all that's gone on this year, I collected 27 of the best articles published on Opensource.com in 2017 on the subject. I divided them into broad themes, rather than ordering them by popularity.

Over the course of 2017, Opensource.com shared many ways that Linux and Raspberry Pi are improving education, from preK-12 schools all the way through colleges and universities. We've collected nine of the best articles that show how these technologies are influencing teaching and learning, not to mention educational institutions' IT practices. Click through these links to find out how students and teachers are using Raspberry Pi and IT shops are benefiting from Linux.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s flagship conference gathers adopters and technologists from leading open source and cloud native communities in Seattle, WA on December 11-13, 2018. Join Kubernetes, Prometheus OpenTracing, Fluentd, Linkerd, gRPC, CoreDNS, containerd, rkt, CNI and more, as the community gathers for three days to further the education and advancement of cloud native computing. 

It’s good to read the recent Dhaka Tribune report that the government is planning to introduce ICT in primary education. The question is: What will be taught? Primary school children in Bangladesh probably have never seen or touched a computer before. Teaching them involves starting at a much more basic level than students in the West, who have generally seen computers at home from a young age.

I'm always looking for ways to map hot technologies to fun, educational classroom use. One of the most interesting, and potentially disruptive, technologies over the past few years is cryptocurrencies. In the early days, one could profitably mine some of the most popular cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, using a home PC. read more

Institutions of higher education stress the importance of student autonomy in academic exploration—yet the typical configuration of university courses does not take full advantage of students' potential to become actors in their education, rather than just receivers of it. To realize this potential and make university learning more inclusive of—and meaningful for—students, professors could learn a lesson from open organizations. read more

Most people consider a college education the key to future success, but for many students, the cost is insurmountable. The growing open educational resource (OER) movement is attempting to address this problem by providing a high-quality, low-cost alternative to traditional textbooks, while at the same time empowering students and educators in innovative ways. One of the leaders in this movement is Robin DeRosa, a professor at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire. read more

an operating system called Minix, created for educational purposes by Andrew Tanenbaum in the 1980s, which is currently running on all the Intel machines you can think of.

Phishing is one of the most dangerous threats to modern computing. Phishing attacks have evolved from sloppily written mass email blasts to targeted attacks designed to fool even the most cautious users. No defense is bulletproof, and most experts agree education and common sense are the best tools to combat the problem.

A couple of years ago, I was talking to PayPal senior director of software development Harper Reed at All Things Open in Raleigh, N.C., when he suggested that the best way to invigorate education would be to purchase Raspberry Pis en masse and put them in public libraries.

The rising cost of college education threatens many potential students' ability to access higher education, but a growing group of professionals is trying to help defray costs by applying lessons from open source development to course material development. These open educational resource (OER) supporters are actively advocating for open pedagogy and creating openly licensed, high-quality textbooks. read more