Digital inclusion project
Introduction
The Paraná Digital Project (PRD) is a digital inclusion project for public schools in the Brazilian state of Paraná. The project has created multi-terminal computer laboratories in more than two thousand public schools, including agricultural schools. More than 1.5 million users will benefit when the project ends, and there will be more than 40 thousand terminals in operation.
The labs have computers supporting four-head multiseat terminals (display/keyboard "Keyboard (computing)"/mouse "Mouse (computing)" arrays) running Debian (a Linux distribution). The hardware cost is 50% less than the regular price and there is no software cost.
The project was conceived and is being developed by the Center for Scientific Computing and Free Software (Centro de Computação Cientifica e Software Livre) (C3SL) of the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), responsible for the portal and multi-terminal software.
The project has not yet been completed, but the benefits of multiterminals with free software are promising.
Paraná Digital in numbers
• - 2100 schools.
• - 1,500,000 students.
• - 57,000 teachers.
• - 22,000 orange TVs (1 per classroom).
• - 44,000 computers.
educational media
• - . The Dia-a-dia Educação portal is an online tool that provides specific content for educators, students, the school and the community. Its purpose is to serve the entire educational community of Paraná, offering, through the fast and direct technology of the Internet, content, information and services in exclusive environments and with the information arranged according to specific public objectives.
• - TV Paulo Freire. TV Paulo Freire is a television channel with programming aimed at the school community in the state of Paraná, with the objective of assisting the teacher training process, increasing research sources and resources used in relation to teaching and learning.
• - TV Multimídia. TV Multimídia is a project that installed 29-inch televisions, with inputs for VHS, DVD, memory card and pendrive and outputs for sound and multimedia projector, in all 22 thousand classrooms of the state education network, even providing a pendrive device for each teacher. Thus, the teacher can bring external resources, files from the portal and videos from among other things, to complement the teaching process in the classroom.