Ubuntu 20.04 For Teachers and Students

Let me share with you my Ubuntu tips for teaching and studying you could practice easily at school. Of course these tips are based more on free/libre open source software principles so you will see alternatives like PeerTube among mentioned tools. However, all software mentioned below are Free Software exclusively and available in 20.04 Focal Fossa. I hope websites other than UbuntuBuzz follow by exposing Ubuntu education capability like this. Happy studying!

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For Teacher

Items with (*) are accessible with web browser.  For the user manuals, see last section.

Teaching Tools:

• Screenkey - keyboard live typing indicator. Good for teaching through videos as the viewer see on screen everything you type.
• Jitsi (*) - video call and conferencing, alternative to Zoom, easy to use for everyone without registration and without app installation.
• Kazam - screencasting tool alternative to Camtasia, but easier to use.
• Ethercalc (*) - online spreadsheet, alternative to Gafam's one, useful for example to record your students attendances or similar things.
• PeerTube - video sharing platform, alternative to YouTube, which your students can download every content from. The cool video above is uploaded at PeerTube!
• Shutter - professional screenshot tool. I use this to annotate all my screenshots in UbuntuBuzz as well as in my course.
• Texmaker - a very good LaTeX editor with preview feature and easy for beginners.
• GNS3 - computer networking simulator, a free software replacement to Cisco Packet Tracer.
• Kdenlive - decent video editing tool.

Settings:

• Website block - use this to block certain websites in a certain period of time in students computers.
• Classroom management - Veyon (formerly iTALC) is a central monitor application of all computers in a classroom which can work with Ubuntu and Windows. This is very interesting for schools which have not implemented classroom management yet.

For Students

Studying tools:

• File Manager - to access all your files and storage drives.
• LibreOffice Writer - your Word. Make sure to save as Open Document Format and ask others to do the same. To print out, export as pdf first and print out that pdf instead.
• LibreOffice Calc - your Excel. It can edit xlsx spreadsheets and save as pdf.
• LibreOffice Impress - your PowerPoint. It can edit pptx presentations and save as pdf as well. For you seeking for examples, let me share with you all my presentations I use to teach online.
• Inkscape - your drawing and picture editor application.
• StarDict - for non-english students here is desktop dictionary application that support so many languages. In Indonesia, I taught my students to install this as their Indonesian<>English dictionary.
• Zotero - the best reference/bibliography manager, alternative to Mendeley, which can be integrated well to Mozilla Firefox and LibreOffice. 

For user manuals, see last section too.

User Guides

I have made a lot of tutorials for the aforementioned tools:

• Jitsi - step by step in how to make your first video call.
• LibreOffice Writer - guide to make your documents and macros, see the LibreOffice section there.
• Kazam - how to record your screen as video including your voice.
• Screenkey - how to install and use on-screen keystroke indicator.
• Zotero - all UbuntuBuzz's tutorials on the bibliography manager including the integrations.
• StarDict - its features, and, how to install the desktop dictionary.

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