Anecdote shared by Doug Dangler, CSTW Writing Center Director at OSU:

Recently, I ran an Outreach workshop for central Ohio teachers (http://cstw.osu.edu/outreach/seminars.cfm) titled “Who's Listening; Who's Talking?: Creative Ways to Engage Students with Writing in a Auditory Medium.” I used the portable apps versions of GIMP and Audacity to help teachers create media for a wiki at http://columbusteachers.wikispaces.com/. Portable Apps (http://portableapps.com/) was the perfect open source program suite to use because the teachers were not allowed to install software on their school computers. Without the flash drives-based portable apps, they would not have been able to have their students work with digital audio at all in their classrooms. Now, they can simply plug the flash drive into the back of their computers and let their students record and share audio projects on password-protected wikispaces sites.