Tag: Tools

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Toolboxes – an overview of overviews

There are now so many digital tools, apps, programs and platforms for digital teaching and learning that it can be difficult to choose. Annotated overviews, websites and toolboxes are intended to make this selection easier and to make applications easier to find. We have tried out and compared some of them.


1. Find my Tool

FindMyTool originated as a collaborative tool on Github and includes over 800 tools as of today. The filterable collection in the form of tiles is available in German, is constantly being expanded and updated, and allows suggestions. The use is free and possible without registration.

  1. Digitale Tools – eine Übersicht

The bildung.digital list is aimed specifically at schools and teachers and is organized by application area. Only tools recommended by the editorial team are presented. The list is free of charge and available in German without registration.

3. Portal:Tools

Portal:Tools is designed by Martin Luther University Halle for university teaching as a filterable table and presents a large selection of corresponding tools in German. There is the possibility to suggest tools and the use is free of charge without registration.

4. Tool-Sammlung

The digital tool collection from Hochschulforum Digitalisierung is the result of a community survey. The list includes a selection of tools for online events and is organized by application area. The list is free and available in German without registration.

  1. alternativeTo.net

On the crowd-sourced website AlternativeTo.net, users can search specifically for alternatives to a particular tool. The website displays descriptions and user comments about each tool and lets you filter the provided overview of alternatives by platform, features and license. It is available free of charge and without registration in English.

These examples differ, among other things, in their structure and focus such as specific topics or teaching/learning contexts. We are happy about all solutions that help to make tools findable and to decide consciously and criterion-guided for or against certain tools.

Like quite a few other OER projects, some overviews are funded by third party funding or limited by a funding line, so hosting may not be taken over in the long term (think of the wonderful OER Worldmap, which is unfortunately no longer available). With the idea of being able to optimize and administer an overview in the long term, the OESA Toolbox was created in May 2020 during the hackathon “Wir hacken das digitale Sommersemester” (We hack the digital summer semester) by the Hochschulforum Digitalisierung (Higher Education Forum Digitization) as a volunteer-organized and independent project. It is intended as a filterable overview that can be used to search specifically for tools, categories, settings and functions. If a tool is missing from the overview, a new line can be added without registration and tracking, and we add any fields that may have been left empty. We host the toolbox in Germany and have provided a manual with ideas for didactic use under an open license (CC-BY-SA).

Looking to the future, we want to help optimize existing offerings and make interfaces available. For example, we are curious to see how the national education platform can advise teachers and learners in the search for and selection of suitable applications.

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Open Source in agriculture?!

When most people think of “open source”, they don’t initially think of agriculture, gardening or food cultivation. In fact, it is precisely in this area that there are promising ideas and lively developments.

This is possibly due to the ever-growing population and the climate crisis, which will increase the potential for food insecurity in the future. One possible solution to these problems and sustainable food production may be precision agriculture. It is characterized by the use of digital technologies to monitor and optimize agricultural production practices and provides a mechanism to improve food security and create sustainable food patterns. Various sensors are used for this purpose, such as those that measure the water storage capacity of the soil or the temperature. If, for example, an irregular water storage capacity of the soil is detected by the devices, the water supply to the plants can be adjusted to their needs. Your own garden or farm thus becomes a research station. The easiest way to implement this concept is with the help of open source technologies and applications to grow food where it was not possible before and have a food source at any time of the year. In open gardening and open farming, food computers in particular are widely used. These are basically tabletop gardens controlled by a computer through a network of sensors, lights and fans, and were first developed by students at Green Street Academy. It is a foam box that contains everything a plant needs to grow and thrive: Water, food, light and a controlled climate. But Open Gardening and Open Farming are not just about the technologies used, but also the corresponding open mindset. All of these developments were and are only possible through collaboration. In the foreground of the Open Farming community is the exchange of knowledge and ideas in order to jointly and mutually realize and further develop the various projects. In the following, we present four such open projects that are working together to address the problem of the climate crisis:

With FarmBot, anyone can use CNC machines that use control technology to automatically produce workpieces and the associated web app on any computer or mobile device to grow various plants and vegetables and manage their own garden from anywhere. The control system is operated manually and no programming skills are required. The open-source technology can grow a person’s entire vegetable needs continuously, and after two years, at a lower cost than buying from the average U.S. grocery store.

OpenFarm is a free and open database of agricultural and horticultural knowledge. The idea was to create, with the help of experts and beginners in agriculture, a centralized, structured and open dataset describing how to grow plants under specific environmental conditions and with specific cultivation practices. This created a community and tools for freely sharing crop knowledge locally and globally, with the goal of breaking down boundaries through the open exchange of knowledge and increasing participation in the food system. All data and content of OpenFarm is in the public domain (CC0) and thus easily accessible. The source code of OpenFarm is available on GitHub under MIT license.

farmOS is a web-based application for farm management, planning and recording. It is being developed by a community of farmers, developers, researchers, and organizations with the goal of providing a standard platform for collecting and managing agricultural data. The farmOS server is based on Drupal, which makes it modular, extensible and secure, and, like the accompanying app, is licensed under the GNU General Public License, meaning they are free and open source.

TANIA is an open source farm management or administration software for farmers initiated with the help of developers, users, farmers, researchers and agriculture experts from Tanibox in 2017 and hosted on GitHub. It was developed primarily for farmers and developers interested in precision agriculture. The software works on any farm, is easily accessible, flexible, secure, user-friendly and affordable. It also provides connectivity with devices such as sensors and actuators to give farmers more control over monitoring and controlling their farm, wherever they are and whenever they need it. This allows them to make their operations more sustainable.

Sources:

https://www.thuenen.de/de/at/arbeitsbereiche/umwelttechnologie-boden-pflanze/praezisionslandwirtschaft/

https://www.redhat.com/de/open-source-stories/farming-for-the-future

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Surveys, polls and quizzes in (digital) educational settings: alternatives to Doodle

Surveys and didactics

Digital teaching via Zoom or similar can quickly become passive and monotonous. In order to avoid the transfer of frontal teaching into the digital format and to reduce the inhibition threshold for participation in digital teaching, survey tools can be integrated as didactic means in the common video conferencing tools. These can be used flexibly and are a simple means of activating learners. Classically, surveys are used in teaching for knowledge or opinion polling. Thus, with the help of online or live surveys, knowledge can be checked or opinions can be obtained in real time in the classroom. This form of interactivation is particularly suitable offline and online for involving the large group or the plenum. The process is simple: surveys can be created and enabled in advance or live in the session, and respondents answer by clicking a link or QR code via smartphone or computer. In the process, the video conference management can decide whether voting should be anonymous or whether the names of the participants should be visible to everyone or only to themselves. The results of the poll are output in real time. In addition, polling tools can be used in class or course scheduling or to help assign topics for assignments, presentations or papers. Real-time questioning via a Twitter wall also provides a nice change of pace. Formats such as Tweedback digitally collect questions that lecturers can respond to later. Keyword collections and ideas can be designed as digital card queries with tools such as Oncoo – this works very similarly to the analog collection of topics on moderation cards. When integrating survey tools, many instructors turn to Doodle.

Criticism of Doodle

Doodle seems to be a simple solution: Commonly known and easy to use. However, the platform is problematic in terms of data protection, because Doodle is based outside the EU. In the free Doodle account, surveys are not SSL-encrypted, i.e. personal data is transmitted transparently and not protected from external access. In addition, Doodle allows advertisements from Google (AdSense) in its surveys. So at the latest when it comes to use in a school context and the online safety of children and young people, it becomes critical. Therefore, in the following we present safe alternatives that are free and partly open. Note: Free and open are not necessarily the same thing.

  1. Pingo

The open source application Pingo was developed by the University of Paderborn and made available free of charge. Hosted in Germany, the tool can be used to create simple surveys to query the state of knowledge or gather feedback. Since it is a university project, the operators themselves also offer didactic advice here on how to best integrate the tool into teaching.

  1. LamaPoll

The survey tool LamaPoll can be used to create simple polls and polls as well as scheduling and scientific questionnaires. The service is DSGVO compliant and does not collect IP addresses or other personal data.

  1. Nuudel

The non-tracking survey tool Nuudel is offered free of charge by the non-profit association Digitalcourage e.V. and can be used primarily for opinion polls and voting. Nuudel is based on the free software Framadate and runs on the association’s hardware. Server and software are protected from external access and no IP addresses are stored, only the answers in the polls. Registration is not required and instead of an email address, anything can be typed in.

  1. Tweedback

The survey tool Tweedback can also be used anonymously, since users do not have to register with an e-mail address and no IP addresses are permanently stored. Instead, only the most necessary data is stored on servers located in Germany. In the basic version, Tweedback offers the functions chatwall, quiz and panic button.

We have explained these functions in more detail in a tutorial on YouTube. In it, we introduce you to the survey tools Tweedback, Pingo and Kahoot! and compare them based on their scope of use, GDPR compliance and possible uses.

You’d rather get an overview yourself? In our toolbox you can compare the survey tools mentioned and many more and filter them by different features.

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Situation and development of school clouds in Germany

The corona-induced homeschooling or distance learning has put learning with digital media in the focus of public discussion and made clear differences in the use of school clouds in Germany visible. The Institute for Information Management at the University of Bremen (ifib) was therefore commissioned by the Telekom Foundation to conduct a systemic inventory of school learning platforms and IT strategies in all German states and five German municipalities. The recently published study addresses the questions:

  • What is in the various learning platforms that the federal states and also some municipalities offer their schools?
  • How are the systems organized technically?
  • Who provides pedagogical and technical support?
  • How much do these solutions differ from one another?

In addition to an overview of the solutions used, the study also provides a model that systematizes all parts of a learning management system (LMS) and shows what opportunities the respective learning platforms offer students, how the operation of the systems is organized, and who provides pedagogical and technical support. Bavaria, Bremen, Hamburg and Saxony showed a broad set-up of digital media for teaching. In other states, however, different solutions exist side by side in some cases.

The study’s final finding:

There will probably not be a nationwide uniform school cloud solution in Germany – and it is not necessary as long as there are common standards and functioning interfaces for all existing learning management systems in the future.

The benefits of LMSs should have been clear at the latest since the school closures, even though Germany was very late in getting involved with learning platforms by international standards. As true all-rounders, school clouds or learning management systems support teaching and learning processes, simplify organizational processes, and provide a technical basis for communication between teachers, learners, parents, and the school through supplementary offerings from external providers (e.g., by means of video conferencing systems or messenger services).

We at OESA e.V. recommend the following, open source-based systems:

  1. Moodle
  2. ILIAS (developed at the University of Cologne)
  3. and StudIP.

All three are hosted on the school’s own server, are therefore DSGVO-compliant, free of charge and free of advertising, and make it possible to control access rights for the various instances through closed user groups. However, setting up learning environments is highly dependent on the IT infrastructure available in each case; both Moodle and Ilias must be set up and hosted as closed systems on their own servers. Those looking for lower-threshold offerings will have to reckon with a loss of functionality. However, in order to establish open source systems, such as Moodle, in the school context in a long-term, sustainable and future-proof manner, much greater investment in the know-how of the institutions and the competencies of the people is required in addition to the provision of material resources for IT equipment. We have compiled further information on LMS and their didactically meaningful use here.


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Do we need alternatives to Padlet?

Recently, Padlet was classified as problematic in terms of data protection by the LDA Brandenburg. The educational server Berlin-Brandenburg now also advises against the use of Padlet. Since then, the use of Padlet has been discontinued at many schools in Germany, which is regretted by many teachers who have increasingly used digital tools for teaching since the beginning of the Corona pandemic and homeschooling and are enthusiastic about the intuitive and playful design as well as the many possibilities Padlet offers.

The problem with the interactive pinboard tool: data protection.

Padlet is not GDPR-compliant. The platform originates from the United States, where the General Data Protection Regulation does not apply. Previously, use of the platform in a school context ran under the “Privacy Shield,” under which U.S. providers had to comply with European data protection regulations. This was overturned and since July 2020, no personal data may be transferred to the United States. However, Padlet shares data with third-party providers, such as Google, when it is used. The exact data content is largely unknown, but Padlet can store and process personal data such as shared content, IP addresses or movement profiles by the company or third-party providers. Thus, the risk outweighs the benefit for data protectionists.

But there is also a way to use Padlet without data protection problems. Padlet can also be used without an account. Instead of registering, you can also log in via a guest account to avoid creating your own profile. Students can also access Padlet through a link provided by their teachers. If Padlet is used at school on school devices without the students logging in to other services, their usage behavior remains anonymous as long as no personal data is entered into Padlet. If Padlet is used with a school end device via a private Internet connection, it is not clear what data is collected by the platform operator. However, as soon as the platform is used via private end devices, the provider can store personalized data that can be used to identify the user.

Padlet can therefore only be used on school devices without hesitation. However, if you want or have to avoid using Padlet, you can take a look at the following alternatives or browse through our Toolbox yourself:

1. Pinnit is a data-saving digital pinboard that has many features that Padlet also offers. Collaborative work can be done here and, for example, posts or ideas can be collected. In addition, published contributions can be commented and rated. Only the most necessary data is stored on a German server during use. Furthermore, no personalizing registration is necessary for use and IP addresses are pseudonymized.

2. Taskcards is a German alternative to Padlet. The platform is also DSGVO-compliant and its servers are located exclusively in Germany. Registration is also possible via a guest account. The design and the user interface are very similar to the American model. Many features that are available on Padlet are also offered by Taskcards. Private pinboards can be created here, which can also be published if required. It works with texts, images, links and various file attachments.

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Open Source Messengers: Alternatives to WhatsApp

Digital communication has become indispensable. Professional and private life is shared via messenger and enables an exchange regardless of location. How individual messengers handle the messages, images, audio and files sent is therefore a fundamental question that every user should address. 

This is not the first time that the social messenger service WhatsApp has come under criticism for its data protection policy. At the latest with the acquisition by Facebook, concerns about data security have repeatedly become part of the public debate.

As of May 15, new data protection rules will come into effect at Whatsapp in Germany, which will allow WhatsApp to share the data of its users with Facebook and pass it on to third parties outside the EU.

We are currently reading a lot about Telegram as an alternative. Since messages can be sent to several thousand people at the same time, the Dubai-based messenger has become the preferred communication channel for conspiracy theorists. It is often declared as open source, but only the client is open and the data is stored on unknown servers; the messages are not end-to-end encrypted.

So the question to leave Whatsapp remains open. In the following, we therefore present five open-source alternatives to WhatsApp that take the privacy of their users more seriously:

1. Movim

Movim is based on XMPP, the open standard for messaging. Web-based and decentralized, it can communicate with other applications via XMPP. In addition to the typical messenger functions, such as chats, video chats, editing options and night mode, Movim also offers the options of screen sharing, browsing hashtags, automatically saving message drafts or publishing articles.

2. Session

Like WhatsApp, Session offers a chat function, group chats, voice messages, and end-to-end encryption of chats. Unlike WhatsApp, however, no phone number is needed to use it. Session is blockchain-based and decentralized.

3. Element

Similar to Session, Element does not require a phone number for the common messenger functions. In addition to chat, video chat and telephony, Element also offers the option of joining private or public groups. Element operates decentralized via matrix network.

4. Threema

No phone number is needed to use Threema either. Telephony, video chats, and chats that can be provided with polls are end-to-end encrypted. Likewise, groups can be created and managed. The app comes from Switzerland, which is known for its excellent data protection.

5. Signal

Signal is particularly impressive due to its user-friendliness. The app offers the usual messenger functions (chats, group chats, video chats, telephony), which are all end-to-end encrypted, and does not collect any data except for the phone number.

So there are some alternatives to WhatsApp that not only offer better data protection, but are also openly available. The decision between switching completely or using several messengers depends on the individual situation. But the argument that you can no longer reach all your contacts without WhatsApp will become invalid as soon as enough people use open alternatives. So get active and switch to open source!

You can find all information in a tabular overview in our Toolbox – just search for “messenger”..

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Online Hackathon “We Hack the Summer Semester 2020!”

On May 6 and 7, 2020, more than 900 participants pooled their energy, ideas and skills and developed digital solutions for university teaching in Germany in working groups. The free format was organized by the Hochschulforum Digitalisierung, the KI-Campus and the DAAD and acts as a pilot for the DigiEduHack in November. In the roles of hacker and mentor, groups found themselves assigned to challenges that were assigned to one of the 15 topic clusters:

  1. Qualification & support of teachers
  2. Digital teaching in implementation
  3. Collaborative work and interaction (synchronous and asynchronous)
  4. Digital tools and data protection
  5. Digital Exams
  6. Digital student advising
  7. Digital campus life
  8. Peer support/help-seeking among students
  9. Internationalization & Virtual Mobility
  10. Practical study components & practical projects
  11. Research
  12. University management (e.g. change process & third mission)
  13. Digital student participation
  14. Educational equity & accessibility
  15. AI in digital higher education

A total of 76 projects came about, which can now be viewed publicly on incom. Communication took place via the mattermost platform, and there was a joint introduction and conclusion via Youtube livestream. OESA e.V. has developed the Toolbox, an independent and collaborative overview.

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Shaping open education at universities

Flipped Classroom. What can you imagine by it?

Up to now, knowledge has been imparted during university face-to-face events and the application of the knowledge has been tested individually and outside the university. At the weekly input lunch in April 2020, the change in learning caused by digitization was examined in more detail, which is also becoming noticeable in the university context. For example, the learning locations of theory and application are swapped (‘flipped’): Students acquire the theoretical knowledge on their own before the course in order to then work together in a solution-oriented and case-based manner. In this way, the knowledge transfer is ideally designed, because the interactive work during the attendance time can increase the learning effect.

In this context, social scientist Katharina Mosene presented a number of possibilities for designing innovative university teaching, from live surveys to interactive presentation formats and collaborative tools. She drew on her wide-ranging experience and used teaching/learning concepts that had actually been implemented to illustrate the effectiveness and meaningfulness of open higher education.

In the discussion that followed, specific questions arose about individual tools. The consensus was that there are already a large number of extraordinary tools, but that most lack the knowledge of how to use them effectively or at least the time to deal with them in depth. This is less the case at universities with e-learning offices, eScouts or digital officers – an appeal to the universities!

The presentation on the input can be found here. We thank Katharina Mosene for her encouraging input.

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PLAY 19- Creative Gaming Festival

Your spaceship is stranded on an unknown planet. You have to explore your surroundings to survive, but you quickly realize: danger lurks everywhere. Darkness. Ominous silence. And out of the silence, strange creatures burst forth and monsters!

Scenarios like these can be found in a number of games: Dungeons & Dragons, a classic pen-and-paper game, has delighted many game lovers since the 1980s, while role-playing games and first-person shooters add interactive graphics to the gaming experience. Virtual reality games go one step further.

VR glasses create a different reality in which it is possible to move and react. For the game scenario described at the beginning, the controls of the game were explained in a preparation room at the creative gaming festival “PLAY 19” in Hamburg. Afterwards you dive into the world in which you have to escape from your spaceship and put monsters to flight. For the person wearing the VR goggles, this creates a realistic game, intuitively dodging, taking a step back, ducking. All bystanders see only someone with a black box on his head, who staggers around in an absolutely unpredictable way and bumps into all kinds of objects and people. The game could also be controlled calmly and standing in one place, but the physical and emotional reactions are much more intense through the 3D experience than in computer games, for example.

Another game was about playing in a group and in a confined space: One person lies down in a coffin with a smartphone and headphones, and other players stand around him. The goal is to solve puzzles together with other players standing in front of the coffin and finally free oneself from the coffin. Creative Gaming is therefore by no means always the same, but enables very versatile experiences through a wide variety of methods.

More and more people are enjoying trying out such methods themselves. Tables and instructions on a wide range of topics were available in a makerspace: Graphic design, sound effects and small programming. A virtual figure could be programmed with the help of a low-threshold construction kit. In German language, one can thus learn the logic of programming languages and at the same time directly see the results of one’s own programming, which makes programming itself a kind of game.

Of course, the Speakers’ Corner is a must at such an event, as are the numerous training sessions, artist talks and workshops. On one of the four festival days, there was a special offer for schools, which was well attended. The highlight of the event was the Game Award, which is presented every year to innovative games, productions or prototypes. All in all, the PLAY is a versatile offer to get a taste, to inform and to try out, but also to deepen and to network. We are looking forward to the next PLAY…