CIDETYS launches a Free Educational Software Catalog for professors and students of the panamanian public education system.  This catalog is part of the strategy of promotion of Free Software in the Ministry of Education of Panama (MEDUCA), led by CIDETYS with the support of the Technological University of Panama (UTP), the National Authority of Governmental Innovation (AIG) and the National Secretary of Science, Technology and Innovation (SENACYT).

This catalog includes 43 programs oriented towards primary and secondary education.  It also includes an introductory section about Free Software and its importance in education, and an introduction to the operating system Edubuntu,  chosen as the free software operating system to include in the computers bougth by  MEDUCA for the public schools in 2011.

This catalog is published under the terms of the Creative Commons, Attribution, Share Alike license.  This license was chosen because one of the main objectives of the catalog is to be used by other latin american individuals, academic institutions and non-governmental organizations, to spread the word about free software for educational purposes. 

You can download the catalog (only availabe in Spanish)  here

About this catalog

The work of this catalog started in 2010, inspired in the publication Free Software for Schools, published by Open Source Victoria in 2007.  It was difficult to find such a compilation of free software for schools in Spanish, so we decided to start the work of a catalog in Spanish that could be beneficial not only for the panamanian public school system but for the rest of Latin America, through its publication online at no cost and with a Creative Commons-BY-SA license.

Authors and contributors

This catalog has been edited by Monica J. Mora, project coordinator at CIDETYS.  She has worked for the last two years on projects involving the promotion and implementation of free software in areas such as education and public administration in Panama. She collaborated with MEDUCA in the selection of Edubuntu as the free software operating system to be included in the computers for public schools in 2011.  She has prepared workshops and materials about free software for professors of MEDUCA.

Sharon L. Perez and Mario I. Gongora are last year students of Systems Enginnering in the UTP and contributed to this catalog with the compilation and organization of the free software included.

Professors Joaquin González, Jorge Batista and Leomar Acosta, kindly attended our call for testimonials about their use of free software in their classes.  They represent a sample of the increasing amount of professors in Panama that are using free software tools in the classroom.