Brazil's Ministry of Education (MEC). have just unveiled that KDE on Linux is to   become the software platform in the primary school education system in Brazil.  By the end of this year, 29,000 labs serving 32,000,000 students,

will be fully deployed and in active use.

There are plans to increase this to 53,000 labs serving 52,000,000 students by the end of next year (2009). What is interesting about this project is that it not only provides infrastructure (computers and net connectivity), but also open content to students in public schools.

The software installed on these systems is "Linux Educacional 2.0", a very clean Debian-based distribution, with KDE 3.5, KDE-Edu, KDE-Games.  The use of KDE4 in future implementation is just starting to be explored.

 

You can have a look at the clean desktop here:

 

Notice the addition of a quick navigation bar on top: this was the result of study conducted by the project's researchers, and gives quick access to content and activities.

 

The whole system performs extremely well and it was available at the forum in multiterminal stations. This new versions incorporates lots of improvements gathered from the feedback provided by previous version, which is already deployed to thousands of labs in the country.

 

 

The open content and the Linux Educational distribution can be found at http://webeduc.mec.gov.br/ in Portuguese only.

 

 

special thanks to piacentini

http://piacentini.livejournal.com/7871.html