New tools for education in a new age

Abstract

Today, the use of the Information Technology is exponentially growing. In the Technical School, we are forced to introduce the use of new tools in order to increase the student’s knowledge. The new technologies are expensive most of the times, but we think that the university must adopt them when ever it’s possible. By looking for the options with lower costs, we can do it.

Our proposal is the use of free operating systems, instead of the official (and more expensive) operating systems, and the freeware and shareware software. With them, we can use the ultimate technologies without excessive costs. The new movement in Computer Science is going to it. We’ll analyze several options, offering a vision of what we can offer in teaching.

The new tendencies contribute to the low costs for teaching and learning, using free operating systems and free (or low costs) tools.

In this way, the Linux operating system is a serious alternative to the Microsoft’s operating systems. It is free, it is obtained through Internet and it has many tools for several teaching areas: Physics, Mathematics, Engineering, Chemistry, etc. We have also free software for the commercial operating systems and for free operating systems. This software has a good quality and, in some cases, is better than the equivalent commercial software. There are many sites in Internet for downloading them. Using them, we can configure a free teaching in learning tool assigning our money for hardware, and obtaining a final low cost system.