|
 An alliance between Microsoft and the government of the state of São Paulo, in southeastern Brazil, is going to result in free e-mail, access to new digital technologies, information about education and Internet for all students and teachers in the basic and technical education network in the state.
This grants Brazil the title of first country to offer this kind of service and should not bring cost to the government, according to a press statement by the state government.
The agreement, whose objective is promotion of public education with the support of information technology, was signed by state governor José Serra and by the global president of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, at Bandeirantes Palace, in São Paulo.
The services are going to benefit 5.5 million students, teachers, directors, supervisors, leaders in education and coordinating teachers of the state education network, as well as the Paula Souza Center, which manages the Technical Schools (Etecs) and Technology Colleges (Fatecs) of the state of São Paulo.
For the creation of e-mails, which may be accessed from any place, by webmail, students and teachers may visit site www.educacao.sp.gov.br and type in their public school registration number and their personal data. The student's and teacher's registration number will work as access passwords to the site for creation of the account.
The capacity of each e-mail is 5 gigabytes. The program uses the same blocking technology used in Hotmail e-mails, which avoids the person receiving risky messages. The e-mails include the name and surname of each user and will be in domain @acessaescola.sp.gov.br and @professor.sp.gov.br.
In the case of Paula Souza Center, the formats for students and teachers will be the same, but in domain @etec.sp.gov.br or @fatec.sp.gov.br.
The partnership should also provide students in the Paula Souza Center with access to a distance learning portal with software Learning Essentials, with clues about compositions, formats for reports, presentations and basic content for digital inclusion, as well as free access to tools developed by Microsoft.
This access is through program Dreamspark, which can guarantee that the student is enrolled in the course and has the right to free access and development software, with the objective of improving their technological education.
The agreement should also allow 14,000 students free computer training for the labor market, in a project named Students to Business (S2B).
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.