Category Archives: OLPC Middle East

250 Palestinian Refugee Children receive laptops in the Amari Boys School!

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Today marks the end of the first-ever XO Summer Camp in the Amari Boys School in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Following the teacher training last week, children came school this week to get familiarized with XOs well before the start of their new school year. The schoolteachers did an amazing job relaying their new skills with the XO to the kids along with help from our amazing volunteers at PaleXO!

The children spent three days learning and exploring activities on their XOs both at home and in the classroom, and took to mastering the programs even faster than their teachers! Kids loved connecting and sharing with each other through the Mesh Network and had a blast playing with the various activities, even learning how to type their names in Write was a joyful game. When showing children the Record activity, featuring a camera, kids were thrilled; unanimously across classrooms kids began to break out dancing in their seats for the camera!

They were so excited to begin; all the students began lining up outside their school as early as 7am each morning to start their day of fun and learning. This was a great opportunity to make learning fun and stimulate school attendance, even in the summer time! As a great finale to the summer children’s parents were invited to attend today’s session in order to maximize community participation in the OLPC project. Children were excited to show their parents what they had learned, and the principal hosted a brief orientation session in order to explain the importance of the project to the future of their children’s education.

Next week we begin our XO Summer Camp at the Amari Girls’ School!

More Pictures!

Teachers start learning with XOs in Palestine too!

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Teacher training is successfully underway this week for three Palestinian UNRWA schools in the West Bank as one of OLPC’s Middle East projects, and it’s been an amazing adventure discovering creative ways of learning and teaching with the XO.

Jumping right into activities teachers explored the Memorize activity during the training and then took their XOs home to spend time developing their own Memorize games. Presenting their games the next morning sparked a great discussion on ways to enhance literacy, spelling, grammar and more through the XO. One teacher developed a Memorize game to assist her students with spelling, by splitting a word in half and asking students to match the pieces in order to form a complete word. Another teacher suggested Memorize as the perfect tool for teaching synonyms and antonyms, while another excitedly noted its merits for teaching English and Arabic.

While curriculum-based activities are always great, particularly when teachers are enthusiastically taking ownership, another teacher in the room noted its significance for social interactions and friendship building between students. For her assignment she went home and took pictures of all the children in her family and built a Memorize game that matched their pictures to their names, fun for everyone in involved! Overall a fun project for collaborating on ways of making relevant content for Palestinian kids on the XO.

What ideas do YOU have for building games with Memorize?

OLPC Afghanistan recap

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Part of an ongoing series on OLPC in Afghanistan.

Since 2008, we have worked with the Afghan Ministry of Education to build capacity for OLPC in Afghanistan. The initial pilots over the past year have been with 4th-6th grade students, in MOE schools and community-based education groups.

OLPC has committed  5,000 laptops to pilots throughout the country, starting with Esteqlal High School in Nangarhar Province’s Jalalabad city.   There the program engaged all fourth, fifth and sixth grade students, with a ‘3 phase implementation model’ (below) used by the ministry.

The next project involved five schools in Kabul city. Initial feedback has unfortunately only been measured in terms of standardized test results (in math and literacy), but initial results showed a 20% increase on those tests.

In the coming months, national team plans to include schools in other provinces.  They also aim to recruit and train more technical people to help with planning and preparing teachers and connectivity teams for schools across the country.

Parts of this post were drawn from the recent report “Briefing Note – One Laptop Per Child in Afghanistan,” by Lima Ahmad (AIMS), Kenneth Adams (AIMS), Mike Dawson (PAIWASTOON), and Carol Ruth Silver (MTSA)

PaleXO + Opensource = PyXO!

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PaleXO, a team of amazing and enthusiastic volunteers dedicated to working with the XO and supporting childhood education in Palestine, just hosted their first python workshop, cleverly titled PyXO!

One of their members, Mohammad Nawahda, decided to start the dynamic team “to make sure PaleXOers get the proper training about Python to ensure they have what it takes to start developing some great local activities and customizing others.” The workshop appeared to be a great success with tons of members from the community excited to get involved and gain basic python training in order to help develop new activities to help Palestinian children learn with their XOs!

Check out their full blog post here!

More Than Distribution in Afghanistan

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For Afghan kids who receive XOs, their educational time is split between self-study with the laptop at home and sharing their learning experience with teachers and fellow students in the classroom. This blended learning model gives kids sufficient learning time and the support to achieve curriculum.

OLPC Afghanistan laptops are installed with an assortment of materials, including the Ministry of Education’s standard national curriculum of books, health information, and complete localization of all core activities in Dari and Pashto.

And the laptops aren’t just for students. By providing information for parents about economic opportunities, they give parents and kids the chance to learn together.

OLPC in Afghanistan: Briefing Note

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Part of an ongoing series on OLPC in Afghanistan.

In their recent publication “Briefing Note – One Laptop Per Child in Afghanistan,” authors Lima Ahmad (AIMS), Kenneth Adams (AIMS), Mike Dawson (PAIWASTOON), and Carol Ruth Silver (MTSA) make one thing very clear: Afghanistan requires an innovative approach to improve their education system.

“The conventional remedy of building more schools, training more teachers and providing more materials would require a six fold increase to the education budget (in the order of $1.8Bn USD per year) and would take 10-15 years to yield measurable results,” the report reads. “While a steady increase in teacher capacity and educational infrastructure is expected over time, Afghanistan does not have the luxury of waiting 15 years to produce the work force foundations for sustainable economic growth.”

Photographed by Jacob Simkin

Instead, the authors say, a more cost-effective, accelerated method lies in using OLPC’s blended learning model, which incorporates technology with teaching. If executed, in 12-18 months OLPC can more than double Afghan students’ time to learning, provide feedback on curriculum materials, and provide resources that the students wouldn’t otherwise have.

By adopting this model, OLPC can “finally give children in both mainstream and community settings sufficient learning time and support to achieve curriculum outcomes.”

Make sure to check out the rest of the report here.