4 years of Plan Ceibal: Much more than a computer

Last year, Uruguay published Plan Ceibal, the Book (with Prentice-Hall), describing the world’s first national-scale implementation of one laptop for every child.   This month they released an amazing video looking back on the first four years of the project:  “Much more than a computer“.

The 15-minute video ranges from what students work on in school, outside, and at home, and how the teaching community thinks about the classroom now.  It is shot mainly outside, emphasizing working with nature and laptops as a part of everyday life.   There is a lot of student work with multimedia in the background.  And they share the view of this work from Ceibal as institution – what the program means for supporting schools across the country, and what it means for the influence of schools in their communities.

“transformamos un privilegio en un derecho” —Plan Ceibal

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Khan Academy videos and OLPC

Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal has a group of teachers and students that have been subtitling and using Khan Academy videos in Spanish over the past year. You can see some of the resulting videos here.

Sam Seidenburg has some suggestions about how we can improve learning with such videos: writing Activities that could be written to support math tutorial and physics tutorial work, or making similar format videos to help people get started with eToys.

Neil Dsouza at teachaclass.org has offered to help anyone who wants to start using Khan Academy videos in their classes.

 

Bhagmalpur school project update

The OLPC Bhagmalpur project, which Sameer started in 2008 with support from the Digital Bridge Foundation, is finishing a renovation that will provide regular power from a generator at the local school, and close to giving the students there their own XOs.   They visited with the students recently, one of whom is featured in our second Mission video, to show them how many people are following the school’s progress.

olpcMAP and Map-12.xo

The latest version of the Map activity was released this month, and works smoothly with the XO-1.5 and with openstreetmap or google map data.

And olpcMAP has been updated to work with new features of the Google App Engine.   Check them both out!    HT to SaigonOLPC for publishing these monthly status summaries.

OLPC Ghana: finally underway in the rural East

OLPC Ghana’s national program, initiated under the last national regime and supported by the Baah-Wiredu Laptop per Child Foundation, was deployed to one large town (the Millennium Village of Bonsaaso), but then was delayed for a year while the new regime reviewed the program.  Recently the rollout of XOs to rural parts of Ghana has continued.

Last week XOs reached a new school in the Suhum Kraboa Coaltar district, as reported by GhanaWeb, along with new furniture for the school. It is unclear from the report, but the laptops there seem to be in a new part the school, in a computer lab. This is unlike the project in Bonsaaso, and not the implementation we would recommend, but it is good to see that school connectivity in rural parts of the country is being revisited as a priority.

 

XOs are heading to Tannu Tuva

Khürgülek Ondar, with help from OLPC-SF, is heading back to Tuva with XOs in hand and some Sugary ideas to share.   Sameer is helping maintain an OLPC Tuva project blog, and they are looking for help in localizing Sugar into Tuvan.

The excellent Kleider clan have been giving him some help… now I hope he finds someone from OLPC MN to meet with him there.