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.

 

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.

A Nepali hacker’s wishes for the School Server

Abhishek Singh from OLE Nepal published his long and excellent XS wishlist, generating a long discussion on the server-devel mailing list (1, 2) and other discussion online.   He discusses some specific use cases for current and requested-future features, including:

  • Porting XS to new version of Fedora
  • Support for more architectures
  • Self-tests
  • Web content filtering
  • Shared Journal Backup
  • A platform for socializing
  • Some specific packages needed for the above.

On the list, Martin comments on the package requests, Mokurai weighs in, and Sridhar points out what OLPC-AU has been doing with their XS builds.

 

eduJAM! starts in Uruguay

The eduJAM! convocation is going strong, with 2-3 days of Sugar camp and discussion among developers and teachers from across the world. Keep an eye on the ceibalJAM site in the coming days for videos and notes from the event.

You can browse some of the presentations on the edujam2011 slideshare account.

eduJAM!-invitacion

eduJAM! invitacion

OLPCistas in Uruguay this week and next

Over 20 OLPC and Sugar collaborators are in Uruguay this week, visiting schools, meeting with the Uruguayan communities (ceibalJAM, RAP Ceibal, and the eduJAM event team), and preparing for the eduJAM! summit for Sugar developers and educators across Latin America.

The attendees are using a separate OLPC Uruguay 2011 blog for the week to track their various travels and projects in Uruguay. If you can’t be there yourself, you can follow along (and share your own questions for the group) here.