Free Software in Education - Summary

This group is not part of the GNU Project.

The Free Software in Education project seeks to enable, advocate, and defend Free Software usage in schools from Kindergarten to university.  Here are hosted software projects created as part of our efforts.

The wiki is at http://fsedu.org/.  CamelCase pages are on the wiki.

What we're doing now:

• The articles on ForStudents, ForFaculty, and ForAdministration

   have lots of text, but seriously need to be refined and checked.

• The FreeSoftwareAcademy's first project, Scheming with GNU

   Guile, is doing relatively well.  SchemeBook.

• Wiki shall be replaced with something really rich.

A short list of our planned activities:

• Many schools force their students to use non-Free Software to

   support non-free file formats, such as MS PowerPoint.  In fact,
   this problem was the original inspiration for this project.  We
   would speak as a third party interest on behalf of students
   asserting their rights to use Free Software, explaining the
   benefits, how to, etc.

• Offer mailing list, Freenode, and Wiki resources to assist teachers

   in developing courses based on free software.  Good support will
   bring satisfied schools that won't switch back very fast and that
   will be positive about free software to other schools.

• Post information about the activity in schools, perhaps with help

   from the Digital Speech Project.  We'll have information sheets for
   schools and students about why Free Software is good for them, and
   why they should care.

   "Did you know if you give your friend a program that is a
   $.... dollar fine?"

• Produce products which are attractive to the schools.  Mainly

   thinking of prefab packages for specific platforms.  Give the
   package a simple graphical interface and automate the installation
   process. Make a lot of these packages then burn them on a cd and
   give them to whoever you want to convince. Chances are good they
   will try it and copy the CD (better explicitly say copying is
   allowed :-) for their collegues, and with a bit of luck they will
   install the packages on the school network....the CD production bit
   is of course not immediately feasible. This project is hosted here.

Registration Date: Mon 10 Feb 2003 08:36:22 AM UTC
License: GNU General Public License v2 or later
Development Status: 3 - Alpha