Background 
Westall Secondary College provides full-time courses at the secondary level for local and international students. The College is situated in the south-eastern region of Melbourne and there is an English Language Centre on site.The college makes extensive use of open source software to help drive the college curriculum, school management and network services. Not only does free softw
are gives us the freedom to copy and redistribute the software with our students, we are free to adapt and modify the software to best suit our needs.
We believe that students should learn about functionalities rather than merely how to navigate menus. They should understand how technology works, not just how to use it. Open Source Freedom day is our chance to to showcase the knowledge that we openly share and celebrate the creative work that we produce.
SFD report
Our school is installing an [http://www.twotouch.com ]Interactive WhiteBoard (IWB) system (locally made) that use a short throw, wide screen projector, optical sensors using no software drivers. Last year I saw this cool TED video about building your own dirt-cheap IWB. The idea of linking a WiiMote with a digital projector this way is credit to the inspiration of Johnny Lee at Carnegie Mellon University. Thank you goes to Graham who encouraged me to give this a workout in my classroom, even organising his son to build some IR pens for us to try.
Today we managed to build our own WiiMote IWB for only $40 of trouble. It now seems to make a lot of sense for us to consider an optical system that uses open software instead of a pressure sensitive board with proprietary software and all the nonsense of vendor lockin.
We managed to product some interesting drawings on a whiteboard displaying an image from a digital projector using a home-made infrared pen. My students and I then had some fun drawing with the open source software TuxPaint on our whiteboard and this free wiimote softwareon my Apple MacBook.
You can view thefull slideshow of drawings that we easily made with TuxPaint, an open source graphics package. In all, it was a nice activity to explain the different technologies used to communicate and network between all the different devices in this setup; BlueTooth, Wireless and Infrared.
Not a bad way folks, for us to celebrateSoftware Freedom Day 2008 with some important lessons learned along the way. 