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:
See how Wikipedia reaches a small village in Peru. This is a clip from the upcoming film “Web”, by Michael Kleiman; featuring Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales.
It shows kids with XOs in the Peruvian Amazon creating on Wikipedia.
Peña Nieto was accompanied by the heads of the ministries of Foreign Affairs, Economy and Education,Â
since the main purpose of this visit is to know about the program “Basic Informatics Educative Connectivity for Online Learning” and do it on our country.The president of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto, arrived a few minutes to the international airport in Montevideo, Uruguay, where he made ​​his first official working visit.
It was reported that the Mexican president was greeted by his South American counterpart Jose Mujica and Roberto Conde, Foreign Minister of Internal Uru
guay in a first meeting during which the hymns were sung in both nations and presented the delegations of both rulers.
Note that Peña Nieto was accompanied by the heads of the
ministries of Foreign Affairs SRE, Economy SE ​​and Public Education SEP, since the main purpose of this visit is to know about the program “Educational Computer Connectivity basic Online Learning “and to implement it in our country.
Watch the video:Â http://youtu.be/2VnokEkq0LI
From his twitter account you can read:
Photo from President’s Instagram profile
Translation from the original post from Fundación Pies Descalzos.
Rodrigo Arboleda, CEO of One Laptop per Child Association, was invited to present at TEDx Bogota in December 2012. The theme of TEDx Bogota conference was “Del dicho al hecho”.
As a part of his presentation, Mr. Arboleda invited children from Fundación Pies Descalzos to present their experiences with OLPC. Fundación Pies Descalzos has worked closely with One Laptop per Child for four years through the College Heights Foundation Cazucá (Soacha) located in Barranquilla and Pretoria. The College Heights Foundation Cazucá has started an educational project that aims for every child to have his or her own inexpensive, green XO laptop and Internet connection. With these tools, users are able to have full access to information, which in turn fosters innovation, creativity and knowledge.
Approximately 200 students from the College Heights Foundation from the third, fourth and fifth grades have extensive experience in using the XO laptop. In presenting at the TEDx Bogota conference, the children showed the audience their skills in working with the laptop. The children also explained to participants at the OLPC booth, all the benefits and changes in the social environment they have witnessed through the use of the XO laptop.
Through the OLPC project, Fundación Pies Descalzos is working to reach its related goals of using innovative methods in the classroom and strengthening teachers’ efforts in the classroom.
By: Walter Bender
There are certainly cases where applying objective measures badly is worse than not applying them at all, and education may well be one of those. –Nate Silver
Not to be deterred by Nate Silver’s words of warning, Claudia Urrea and I continue to work on mechanisms for visualizing learning Sugar. Along with the Pacita Pena and other members of the Learning Team, we have been designing rubrics that capture the level of fluency with the technology as well as the creative use of the individual Sugar tools by children. The rubrics are captured automatically in some Sugar activities, e.g., Turtle Art and a modified version of Write. We are aiming for evaluations that look more broadly than those data that are captured by standardized tests. We just submitted a paper, “Visualizing Learning with Turtle Artâ€, in which we present some measurements calculated from 45 Turtle Art projects created by children working with Quirós Tanzi Foundation.
We claim that the rubric serves as a partial evaluation tool for open-ended projects. Partial, because it is only a measure of how the children used Turtle Art to express themselves, but not what they made or why they made it. But the rubric does have the potential to give some assistance to the teacher who is working within the context of accountability, without adding an additional burden of analysis above and beyond looking at the work itself.
We want children not just to learn about the computer, but also to learn with the computer. Providing activities such as Turtle Art that engage them in computational thinking in the context of personal expression is necessary, but not sufficient. Giving them tools for reflection enhance the learning experience. Giving their teachers simple-to-use mechanisms for assessment increase the odds that activities like Turtle Art will find more mainstream acceptance. Making it easier to assess open-ended projects lowers one of the barriers that are preventing more use of the arts in school.
