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Free Software in Education

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Why?
• How?
• Events
• Who's using it?
• Advocacy
• Free Education Software
• Groups and Projects
• You can help us

Introduction

Free Software can be a valuable resource in education. Not only can it be technically or pedagogically superior to proprietary alternatives, but it can also promote the values of the GNU project in the schools:

• Freedom
• Cooperation

Today, many students and schools don't even know about Free Software or the great advantages it brings. At the same time, software knowledgeability is required for more and more tasks, and Free Software has a distinct advantage in this field. If you are one of those kept in the dark until now, please read some of the informational material we've put together here.

Here is some information we have collected about the relationship between the GNU project and education (you can see more relationships by reading the history of the GNU project). Please send your comments and suggestions about this information to GNU & Education mailing list education@gnu.org

Why?

We're working closely with a new group, Free Software in Education, to produce these introductions. If you are not completely familiar with Free Software, learn why it's right for you!

Each distributable, easily chewable material, such as the Students bulletin posting, leads to an online portal, tailored to the particular group, at which the interested can find out more about what Free Software means, learn how to use it, and of course get it.

• Administration: a short "white paper"-type article, with further research support on the portal
• Faculty: an essay, with interesting software, curriculum, etc. on the portal (in progress; please evaluate and suggest changes.)
• Students: a page in TeX suitable for posting on bulletin boards, with a longer essay and distributions on the portal (bulletin finished; please evaluate and suggest changes.)

A great way to help us would be to work on these documents, or help with other aspects of the Free Software in Education project. Please visit the Wiki and edit some of the pages.

A GNU idea, the Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource, became Wikipedia. Learn about why we need such a resource, and why you should care about it.

Other articles:

• "Why give precedence to Free Software at school?", by Jean Peyratout.

How?

Even though the education demographic is relatively tech-savvy, it still needs help to learn Free operating systems such as GNU. Students, teachers, and adminstrators have some tools at their disposal with which to learn.

Our advice is to simply install a Free operating system, or find an existing installation, and learn how to use it simply by using it. However, these resources may be able to ease your transition.

• Learn Free Software (currently only a pilot effort on the wiki)
• The User's Guide, by Progeny, adapted for use with Debian GNU/Linux. This is primarily a tutorial; for more, see Debian documentation.

Mario Fux <foxman@lugo.ch> writes "TUX&GNU@school" for FSF Europe's education project. It reviews a piece of Free education software in every issue.

Events

Some projects which promotes only free software and education are listed below. Please let us know of other educational events that follow the GNU Philosophy, by writing to GNU & Education list at education@gnu.org.

Who's using it?

There are some groups that maintain statistics of schools that use free software in several regions of the world:

• France, maintained by the group The Libre Software School Day.
• Germany, maintained by Andreas Rittershofer.
• Italy, maintained by the group The Libre Software School Day.

We want to present some stories of classrooms and courses where free software is being used. Whether your usage is creative or not, please share your story. If you do, please send it to education@gnu.org.

Advocacy

Before we can advocate Free Software on a local level, as the Free Software in Education project would like to do, we need to figure out how to do that. Naturally, many of the articles (so far) on the wiki are designed to do just that. We are looking for articles in our area similar to "How to Establish a New Campus Organization" (digitalspeech.org).

• How to convince your school to install GNU/Linux

Free Education Software

We maintain a list of Free Software and Free Software projects for education.

Other Groups and Projects

There are several groups and projects that are working with Free Software and Education. A few of them are listed below. If your project supports only free software and it is not listed here, please send an email to education@gnu.org.

• Free Learning Resources is about bringing the principles of Free software to educational materials and otherwise general knowledge.
• Debian Jr., promotes the creation of a distribution of free software appropriate for kids.
• DebianEdu, a related project, to create a distribution suitable for installation in school networks. It is now integrating Skolelinux, so may become the Free Software in Education group's preferred distribution.
• Gleducar, a GNU at education Argentinian project.
• OFSET, The Organization for Free Software in Education and Teaching, promotes the use of free software in education. Take a look at Freeduc-cd, a live-cd for education setup by Ofset.

You can help us

If you know any educational project based on Free Software, please submit the project page and a brief description to education@gnu.org

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