Educational Resources

[Paulo Francisco Slomp]

Joseph

> I'll try to put them together into one list that could be used as a reference.

Dynamic Table of Free Educational Software

The wiki format allows collective work. You can contribute even anonymously.

Source: https://2015.rmll.info/tableau-dynamique-du-logiciel-libre-educatif?lang=en

The free educational software dynamic table is the result of a collective work. Several generous people contributed to the initial translation to 6 languages and, after publication, several other people have contributed voluntarily. A lot of people contributed disclosing the table through blogs, microblogs, social networks, mailing lists and websites. Sites of governmental institutions in the education area and associations dedicated to the defense and promotion of free software also disclosed the table. Thanks to all.

One way we found to return this people support was to publish the table with the Creative Commons BY-SA license. We believe that a collective work should not have private ownership. In this type of license it is allowed republishing, remixing and even commercial use. In the CC-BY-SA it is not allowed to abandon those freedoms. Only two people, the initial author and the fellow graduate André Ferreira Machado, work receiving institutional support from the Distance Learning Secretariat of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, to whom we thank.

One might think that drawing up a table with information about free educational programs is not a novelty: You can find on the Internet dozens of lists and tables with this content, but in general the tables are static, without interactivity, and are sorted by areas of knowledge, providing a short description of each program. Some of these tables record the official web page of the programs. More rarely, the table presents the possibility of reorganizing the data so that the user can easily combine the most interesting information.

For example:

    Can the software be used in elementary school, high school, university?
    The program has versions for different operating systems such as GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac?
    In which web page can I download these versions?
    What kind of free software license (GNU-GPL, Apache, MIT, BSD, etc.)?
    In which web page can I download the source code?
    The program interface is translated into the students native language of the my classroom?
    Is there a page about the program on Wikipedia?

The dynamic table free educational software - http://ufrgs.br/soft-livre-edu/dynamic-table - answer these questions. In addition, through a few clicks, intuitively, the user can reorder the information in succession, keeping the previous order. That is, the user, to reorder the table to display the programs that can be used for high school, for example, can then reorder by clicking the first line of the GNU-Linux column, without breaking the previous order.

Complementing the technical features, the wiki format allows collective work, through the interaction between users. The bidirectionality between the table and the users brings the possibility to add new content and correct errors and inaccuracies directly, without requesting permission from authors. You can contribute even anonymously.

In quantitative terms, the table features more than 320 educational programs for areas such as Biology, Physics, Geography, Mathematics and Chemistry, among others. Each area is different from the others by colors, for easier viewing of the set.

Beyond the native language of the initial authors, Brazilian Portuguese, there are versions in English, Spanish, French, Italian, German and European Portuguese.

Paulo Francisco Slomp
Professor of Educational Psychology and of Free Software in Education at the Faculty of Education of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. GNU/Linux user since 1999.


On 28-08-2015 22:55, Joseph Bishay wrote:
> Good day everyone,
> 
> I hope you are all doing very well today.
> 
> Next week I'll be doing an orientation for the teachers in our school and I'd like to wow them.  Every year a couple of teachers will comment that 'such-and-such' a piece of software is ideally what they need, but it is Windows-only and won't run on our system; why do we need to use this, etc, etc.
> 
> Could you share names of K-8 or K-12 educational pieces of software and websites that you and your teachers use? I'll try to put them together into one list that could be used as a reference.
> 
> Thanks!
> Joseph
> 
>