OLPC supporting private schools in Rwanda backing the government’s commitment to deploy One million XO before 2017.

On  October 27th, 2012,   the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Education, Mme Sharon HABA, told the press that Rwanda is  highly committed to providing each child in Rwanda with an XO laptop. The Ministry of Education recently set a goal to deliver one million (1,000,000) XO laptops to children in primary schools before 2017.

Public schools in Rwanda will be given priority in the distribution process. All students in grades P4 to P6 will be given a laptop at no cost to the child and his or her parents. Given that public schools will be given priority in the distribution process, several private schools in Rwanda decided to buy laptops directly from the government for their students.

OLPC has been providing technical support and teacher training on the process of integrating the OLPC technology into their teaching and learning environments. OLPC has also provided XO disassembly training to help repair any damaged laptop. OLPC also conducted activities with its Learning Team in the ESCAF primary school in Kigali city and in another private school, AHAZAZA, located in the southern province of Rwanda.

The OLPC Learning Team is currently conducting  a one week series of sessions working with teachers and children on different project based learning activities. These sessions also provide formal training to teachers on the basics of the Sugar Learning Environment.

In these sessions, children generated many interesting project ideas. They then used their XO laptops to research and create projects which they shared with the school. They worked in groups focusing on five topics:

1. What makes different colors in the sky? It was a rainy day and the sky had lots of clouds changing from bright to dark. A group of children observed this and decided to use their laptops to research the cause. This activity led them to identify the different types of clouds and their effect on the climate.

Group worked on clouds presenting their project.

2. Why are there differences in skin colors?  In one of the schools, the school principal is European. This led children to ask, what makes that difference in skin color? They then researched this topic and found that there are biological and physical causes.

3. School Mapping: When the OLPC Learning Team traveled to one of the schools, it was difficult to get directions to the administration office. With this in mind, the children decided to create a map of the school as well as a guide so that people who visit the school can easily find different locations.

4. Why  does the food we eat come out with a different color (excretions):  The children wondered why the food they eat changes color at excretion. The group found out that the digestive system is the system that takes care of the food we eat. They went on to research the digestive process.

5. Soil erosion: Some children were not happy about the rain destroying their playground. They decided to design a water path and suggested the construction of it to the school principal in order to save their playground.

All of these projects were based on a real existing situation in the lives of the children. The children enjoyed working on projects of their choice.

In addition to finding areas of interest and  conducting research on that particular area, the children learned many additional skills such as self-evaluation, leadership and using the XO laptop as a tool to implement their ideas.

With the presence of some of their teachers, children chose among themselves who would be the time keeper, judge, head of the group, and group leader.  This allowed them to truly be in charge of their projects, and the adults served only as  facilitators of this learning process.

During these sessions, children found creative ways to research and implement their ideas.

With these kind of learning sessions, children learn that the XO laptop is not only for “computer time” only but that it can serve a purpose in their daily lives.

 

One Laptop per Child in history – Kofi Annan’s words about OLPC

THE SECRETARY-GENERAL

REMARKS AT MEDIA EVENT FOR “ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD”

Tunis, 16 November 2005

Mr. Negroponte,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Some inventions are ahead of their time.

Others are perfectly of their time.

Still others seem so obvious and natural upon their unveiling that people start asking what took so long for them to come into being.

It is the rare invention indeed that manages all this at the same time.

But Nicholas Negroponte and his team at the world-renowned MIT Media Lab have given us just such a breakthrough.

The $100 laptop is inspiring in many respects.

It is an impressive technical achievement.

It holds the promise of major advances in economic and social development.

But perhaps most important is the true meaning of “One Laptop Per Child”.  This is not just a matter of giving a laptop to each child, as if bestowing on them some magical charm.  The magic lies within – within each child, within each scientist-, scholar- or just-plain-citizen-in-the-making.  This initiative is meant to bring it forth into the light of day.

With these tools in hand, children can become more active in their own learning. They can learn by doing, not just through instruction or rote memorization.  Moreover, they can open a new front in their education: peer-to-peer learning.

Studies and experience have shown repeatedly that kids take to computers easily – not just in the comfort of warm and well-lit rich-country schools, dens and living rooms, but also in the slums and remote rural areas of the developing world.  We must reach all these kids.  Their societies and the world at large simply cannot do without their contributions and engagement.

I thank all involved in “One Laptop Per Child” for this truly moving expression of global solidarity.  I commend the International Telecommunication Union for its role in making this event possible.  And I urge all leaders and stakeholders attending this World Summit to do their part in ensuring that this initiative is fully incorporated into our efforts to build an information society.

Thank you very much.

What’s All This Talk About “Reach Extension?”

Public Impact is a national education policy and management-consulting firm based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. They have been working with Project L.I.F.T. in Charlotte, North Carolina where OLPC will be providing connected XO laptops and ongoing training and support to 2,500 teachers and students.

The efforts of Public Impact are aimed at extending the reach of excellent teachers using job redesign and technology. Public Impact believes schools can put in place models to ensure that all students have access to an excellent education. One of these models emphasizes the use of online digital instruction. In Project L.I.F.T. for example, school leadership teams are looking at spaces throughout the academic day where technology can be swapped for a period of teaching time. This will of course free up the classroom teacher’s time, allowing the educator to reach an even larger number of students on a daily basis.

XO laptops will be used throughout The Project L.I.F.T. Zone to support much of this work. Quality online digital instruction and the already available Sugar Learning Platform will serve as tools to ensure that every student receives the support he or she needs to be successful both in and out of the classroom. Both Sugar’s Journal and online program functions will store student work and data, allowing for continuous reflection, review and remediation.

For more information about the transformational work Public Impact is doing in our schools, visit opportunityculture.org.

Sugar Status – Google Code-in, Young developers, 8M downloads, SF summit and migration

By Walter Bender

Sugar Labs is applying to Google Code-in (GCI), “a contest for
pre-university students (e.g., high school and secondary school
students) with the goal of encouraging young people to participate in
open source.”

Why we are applying? Sugar is written and maintained by volunteers,
who range from seasoned professionals to children as young as 12-years
of age. Children who have grown up with Sugar have transitioned from
Sugar users to Sugar App developers to Sugar maintainers. They hang
out on IRC with the global Sugar developer community and are
full-fledged members of the Sugar development team. It is this latter
group of children we hope will participate in and benefit from Google
Code-in. Specifically we want to re-enforce the message that Sugar
belongs to its users and that they have both ownership and the
responsibility that ownership implies. Just as learning is not
something done to you, but something you do, learning with Sugar
ultimately means participating in the Sugar development process. At
Sugar Labs, we are trying to bring the culture of Free Software into
the culture of school. So the Code-in is not just an opportunity for
us to get some tasks accomplished, it is quintessential to our overall
mission.

Learn more about GCI and the Sugar Labs GCI effort.

Agustin Zubiaga Sanchez noted that last week we passed the
threshold of more than eight million activities downloaded from the
Sugar Labs activity portal. I echo his sentiment that “I’m very
glad to be a sugarlabs developer. Congratulations to all the team :)”

In the community

Last weekend was the OLPC SF summit in San Francisco, which was
followed by a three-day Sugar Camp. Although I missed opening day, Day
Two was quite interesting in that there was a lot of good discussion
about how to sustain and grow the various volunteer-run OLPC/Sugar
deployments. At Sugar Camp, although not much code was written, there
was an opportunity to get tangible and actionable feedback from the
likes of Mark Bradley (we pushed hard on Turtle Art as a multimedia
toolkit). I also had the opportunity to catch up with Raul Gutierrez
Segales, Ivan Krstić, and others.

 Tech Talk

The little coding I did do in San Francisco was in support of
migrating more activities to touch. Specifically, I worked on
integrating the on-screen keyboard into several of my activities:
Portfolio and Turtle Blocks. The challenge was that I was using
key-press events directly, rather than accessing them through a GTK
widget such as a Entry or TextView. With help from Raul, I managed to
get things working pretty well: basically, I just drop a TextView
widget under the cursor where I expect keyboard input. The details are
outlined here. I’m generally pleased with the results, but there
is a bit of fine-tuning of the interaction, e.g, you need to defocus
the TextView in order to dismiss it: not such a burden, but at times,
somewhat awkward.

Ignacio Rodriguez has been on a tear, helping me to migrate
activities to GTK 3. Over the past week, we converted: Card Sort,
Cookie Search, Color Deducto, Deducto, Flip, Fraction Bounce, Loco
Sugar, Napier’s Bones, Nutrition, Paths, Pukllananpac, Recall,
Reflection, GNUChess, Sliderule, Story, Yupana, and XO Editor. I also
worked with Agustin Zubiaga on Portfolio, Flavio Denesse on Ruler, and
Daniel Francis on Turtle Blocks. Whew.

Antonio Battro – Interview in Madrid

Antonio Battro, our Chief Education Officer, is both an MD and PhD who specializes in the development of basic cognitive and perceptual processes in children and adolescents. He has introduced computers and communication devices in schools in several countries in South America, as well as promoted the use of computers as digital prostheses for the disabled persons. He is considered a world leader in the new field of neuroeducation, the interaction between mind, brain, and education. Battro is an Argentine national and long-standing member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Here, the video of his latest interview in Madrid. (Spanish)

October 20, 2012: One Laptop Per Child Day in San Francisco

San Francisco Mayor Edwin M. Lee has declared October 20, 2012 One Laptop Per Child Day in San Francisco!

The proclamation reads: “THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that I, Edwin M. Lee, Mayor of the City and County of San Francisco, on occasion of the fourth annual OLPC Community Summit, do hereby proclaim October 20, 2012 as… ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD DAY

Read the full post here.