Category Archives: Children

Major updates about children learning, in the field, XOs in classrooms.

Peru plans OLPC expansion for next year

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Peru is planning to expand their OLPC program to reach every primary school in the country next year.  Last week, during a meeting with regional leaders from the country’s 24 departments, Oscar Becerra commented on plans for the program to reach over 16,000 primary schools across the country – though not every child in each of those schools will have an XO at first.

Peru is working with the department leaders to help them organize regional programs to complete the saturation of their schools.  They are also expanding their awareness and training programs for teachers, with an event last Friday for over 500 teachers. Walter and Rodrigo were both present for some of last week’s events (Walter has been visiting many of the South American OLPC deployments, as anyone following the Sugar digests will know), and the general vibe and feedback from both administrators and teachers was quite positive.

Apostle of the Apoxolypse: Derndorfer’s wandering star

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Christoph Derndorfer, widely known for his ministry to young XO pilots, fashion sense, and active speaking / writing /editing about OLPC, has recently kicked off a Latin American Tour.  (Todd Kelsey, where are your tour-badge-printing skills when we need them?)  He plans to visit all of our country partners in the region with significant deployments this summer, documenting his experience.

Christoph’s travel reports are enchanting.  Take for instance the recent photoessay from Montevideo’s  eXpO photo exhibit in Uruguay – composed entirely of photos taken with XOs by students in 4 primary schools.  And with his iconic beard, long hair, and thousand-meter stare (seen below by the pool at the Fame Factory), Christoph is becoming as known for his xoly presence as for his love of good design and Sugarized icons.

ChristophD caught mid-sentence, with an open XO in his raised left hand

ChristophD preaching the End Times (or at least the Shutdown Screen Icons)

To stalk with him across the southern slopes, deployment by deployment, you can follow his online writings, photos, and twext.  He is looking for personal contacts along the way, especially people who have played a role in OLPC deployments, so please get in touch with him if you know someone he should meet.

http://christoph-d.blogspot.com/

The impact of laptops in education

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By Antonio M. Battro, OLPC’s Chief Education Officer

As stated by the Millennium Goals of the United Nations, it is our duty and responsibility to provide a good education for all children. The purpose is to provide at least elementary schooling to every child in the world by the year 2015.

Education is essentially about universal values of truth, beauty and good. These values are embodied in historical times. We must recognize that today a new artificial environment interacts with our planet: the digital environment. The sad fact is that while many of us live in the digital era, many more are excluded. The digital divide is one of the greatest obstacles to overcome in contemporary education, especially in poor communities.

An isolated school without computers and connectivity to the Internet is incompatible current educational requirements. But of course, technology is not sufficient. Technology may have an impact on education only if constructive dialogue is occurring among teachers, students and their families. Moreover, digital technology should be in the hands of children at an early age for them to learn the new digital language as a second language. And it must be mobile (laptops or netbooks, instead of PCs) because children learn in many kinds of settings, not only in the classroom.

Some economists have tried to measure the educational impact of digital technologies, but they have reported conflicting results (cf. Computers at Home: Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality, by Randall Stross, New York Times, July 9, 2010). For instance, children using computers at school and at home have attained good computer skills while their grades in mathematics and language declined. The more so if they live in low income households. These results need clarification.

First, it is important to understand that time is needed to produce a cognitive transformation in a student. It is possible that some of the reported failures are biased because academic performance was evaluated too soon. Any evaluation must factor in the time span of an entire cohort, which is the basic unit in education. The time cannot be abridged; it requires the entire development of the young mind, from childhood to adolescence, some 10 years since the child enters first grade when most of the connections of the developing brain are made. Many cognitive capacities may be latent for years before they are expressed. Currently, tests are frequently done in static and conventional cross sections during the school year instead of in longitudinal studies of individual cognitive dynamics.

Second, in the digital era we can use digital tools for assessment (e.g., online monitoring of the student activities) but we still need new methodologies to obtain robust results. In particular, traditional statistical comparisons between experimental and control groups (as reported in the quoted studies) are not possible when the digital divide disappears and the entire population of students and teachers of a region or country has full access to the digital environment at school and at home. In that case, the control groups disappear and all students have been “vaccinated.” We must invent new methods of evaluation for the digital era.

Third, scale creates phenomenon. We need to change from microscopes to telescopes in order to encompass the wide spectrum of natural phenomena at different scales. The same is true in education…

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Grand Prairie ISD 1:1 program takes off

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Grand Prairie ISD in Texas is running a saturation 1:1 program, launched in Fall 2009 with two schools: Whitt Elementary and Austin Elementary. They invested in pre-launch efforts, and chose to do everything at once, engaging all parts of the district.

Alisha Crumley, principle of Whitt, reports success and broadly positive feedback for their program.  She describes the process as “pretty seamless, and without challenges… Everyone at the district level that is involved in curriculum, instruction, or technology had a pulse on what was happening.”

That seems a bit rosy without further details.  While they aren’t using XO laptops, they are certainly embracing the spirit of olpc, and I look forward to seeing how they speak about the program in another year.

OLPC Afghanistan in Baghlan

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Part of an ongoing series on OLPC in Afghanistan

This past weekend, OLPC Afghanistan reached Baghlan province, working with the Ministry of Education’s deployment team to provide XOs to 280 children and teachers in grades 4-6  at Firdausi High School.  (In Afghanistan a ‘high school’ can refer to any school whose upper grades reach past 9th grade, but can include students in 1st grade as well.) Firdausi becomes the seventh school in the country to take part in the Ministry pilot program.  The Ministry is working on plans for extending this early work into full-saturation regional or national efforts.

The Firdausi project will integrate the XOs into the school’s teacher planning and curricula, as well as in after-school projects.  They may be used outside of school by families to access training, job information, and resources to develop and improve farms and small businesses.

This pilot rollout was assisted by USAID Afghanistan.  At the end of the day, Earl Gast, the national mission director, commented: “These computers are an investment in Afghanistan’s most important resource – its people.”

: http://blog.laptop.org/2010/07/06/olpc-af-briefing-note/

Young brains and computers: facts and myths

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A post by new contributor Antonio Battro, OLPC’s Chief Education Officer

Recently, there has been much debate about whether computers, video games and electronic gadgets are helpful or harmful to the cognitive development of children. Some naysayers point to a study that says that multi-tasking degrades cognitive performance. The proponents assert that new digital technologies provide new opportunities for creativity and collaboration. This debate is also being played out in ministries of education, universities and classrooms all around the world. The outcome will have a major impact on the education and development of our children.

New disciplines coming from the neurocognitive sciences are changing our theory and practice of education and shaping the new field of neuroeducation. At the same time, new communication and information technologies are changing the way we teach and learn. Millions of children and teachers of the world are sharing and shaping a new neurocognitive digital environment. This formidable transformation has opened a debate that often mixes facts with myths. One of the most disruptive “neuromyths” is that early introduction of computing can harm the brain development of a young child and cause “attention damage.” Some even argue that computing in schools should be introduced only to older children. These are myths that we must replace with facts.

One of the amazing facts is that first and second languages are processed in the same cortical regions of the brain when the second language is learned early in life. Otherwise, the second language is shifted to different circuits of the cortex. In a sense, when humans use a computer and share the same digital environment they are using a second language, or “digitalese.” Postponing the new linguistic skills needed in a digital world contradicts scientific findings in neurolinguistics.
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