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One Laptop per Child Launch Event at Druid Hills AcademyOn February 26, more than 2,000 laptops will be distributed to students in the Project L.I.F.T. zone through the One Laptop per Child initiative, which is funded by the Knight Foundation. This initiative seeks to provide students with access to new channels of learning, sharing and self-expression.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
10:30 a.m.
Druid Hills Academy Cafetorium
2801 Lucena Street Charlotte, NC 28206
In collaboration with ParticipACTION and Ophea, OLPC Canada offers custom content on the XO laptop to encourage physical activity among elementary school students. In Saskatchewan, students and teachers from Ochapowace First Nation had fun exercising to their own rhythm using this custom activity.
Inside a bright sunlit classroom, students hunch over their laptops. They’re laughing and smiling as they create an interactive story with images, sounds and text. One girl happily helps a friend take a digital photo of himself for the multimedia timeline.
It’s a typical college scene. But this isn’t a college. It’s a second-grade classroom at Druid Hills Elementary School in Charlotte, N.C. The students are inventing their own digital version of Little Red Riding Hood. They’re seven years old.
The elementary school is one of nine in a West Charlotte initiative called Project L.I.F.T. The five-year, $55 million public-private initiative is designed to speed student progress in some of city’s lowest-performing schools. Knight Foundation announced $4 million in support last fall. Part of the foundation’s funding will provide laptops to all Kindergarten-through-fifth grade students in the Project L.I.F.T schools.
The students making themselves the heroes in Little Red Riding Hood — and the teachers who plan the lessons that turn computers into teaching tools — are the pioneers. Most of the 3,200 laptops will come in late February and “the excitement is contagious,†said One Laptop Per Child project manager David Jessup, who is overseeing their introduction.
Continue reading the original post from the Knight Foundation Blog here.
Related post:Â Charlotte leaders share path to increasing student achievement
by OLPC Oceania
Hundreds of students, parents, educators and officials gathered today in Majuro, remote capital of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), to formally launch the One Laptop per Child program in the developing Pacific nation. The launch was the culmination of more than 18 months of cooperation and planning between the Marshallese people, their national government, and their development partners: the United States, the University of the South Pacific (USP), and OLPC Oceania.
In attendance at Majuro’s Delap Elementary School were RMI’s President, His Excellency Christopher J Loeak, the Minister for Education, Dr. Hilda Heine, and the US Ambassador to RMI, the Hon. Thomas Armbruster.
2012 is highlighted in Fundación Zamora Terán’s brief institutional history as one of the years when they posed major challenges, but at the same time, when it opened a way to define and develop work in the years ahead.
Read about it here: (non-flash version)
Flash version:
http://issuu.com/marianaludmilacortes/docs/memoria_2012_fzt
On January 30, 2013, hundreds of students and educators joined Minister of Education Dr. Hilda Heine at a morning ceremony to officially launch the One Laptop per Child program in the Marshall Islands. Delap Elementary School on Majuro will be the first school in the RMI to receive and begin using the laptops for its students.
Ambassador Armbruster gives a speech at the launching of the One Laptop per Child program with the DES Principal, Minister Hilda Heine, and President Loeak, among others, listening on.
Minister Heine gave a speech detailing the history behind the project’s launch in the RMI, as well as the project’s relevance and importance to education in the Marshall Islands today. Minister Heine emphasized the extensive training of teachers and careful selection of participating schools based on their performance. She further highlighted and thanked the United States government for providing funding for the project through its continued support of the Ministry of Education.
Following Minister Heine, Ambassador Armbruster spoke, beginning his speech with a series of questions for the more than 300 DES students seated in the audience, to which he received enthusiastic responses. Saying that while laptop computers are modern day learning tools which did not exist when he was a student, Ambassador Armbruster explained that his and older generations had their own learning tools, including “Etch-a-Sketches†and abacuses. The Ambassador emphasized to the students the importance of using their own minds and creativity in conjunction with these tools, as well as the importance of taking good physical care of the laptops. The ceremony closed with songs performed by the DES 6th grade classes.
Students from DES’s 6th grade classes perform a song at the dedication of the One Laptop per Child program.
In total, the RMI Ministry of Education purchased one-thousand of these special laptop computers using Compact Supplemental Education Grant funds from the United States. The remaining laptops will be distributed to schools on Majuro, Arno, Ailinglaplap, Aur, Likiep, and Jaluit Atolls.
US Ambassador to the Marshall Islands, Thomas Armbruster, speaks at OLPC launch at Delap Elementary School, Majuro Atoll:
