Category Archives: OLPC

OLPC in El Salvador

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Teachers and assistants at the Universidad Evangélica de El Salvador

Teachers and assistants at the Universidad Evangélica de El Salvador

El Salvador, which began a 400 XO pilot last year, has been in the news again this week.  Their vice-minister of education Erlinda Handal gave an interview about their program “Cerrando la Brecha del Conocimiento” (Closing the Knowledge Gap), and mentioned hoping to expand their olpc project to cover all primary students in the country over the next four years.

“Children being able to take the ‘laptop’ home is something new, expected to amplify the process of learning, and this opens greater opportunities, better prospects for success.”

I hope to see more news from El Salvador, or at least more videos like these, in the future.

XOs for High School: new design, Uruguay snags 90,000

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We have been working on a new XO laptop for high school students — one with a larger and more responsive keyboard better suited to the hands of older students. And Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal, expanding into high schools across the country, will be the first recipient — they’ve ordered 90,000 of the first production run.

These XO-1.5 HS machines are largely the same as a regular XO-1.5: they are VIA machines with Sugar and Gnome desktops, running both Sugar activities and Gnome apps.  Only the bottom half is different: they have ‘clicky’ rather than membrane keyboards by default, and the base has been redesigned so that keyboards are much easier to swap out or clean — there are two screws you can access from the battery compartment that release the keyboard, then you can pop it out.  No more 10-minute teardowns!

Uruguayan Flag

The new machines will be shades of dark and light blue; the factory is still working on getting the plastics and dye selection just right.  I saw an early stab at this design, and it was very sexy — but I haven’t seen the final keyboard model they are using yet. As a keyboard fanatic (I can get 70wpm on my XO-1), I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for the first one back in the office and will post a review for you.

Now that we have a half-dozen designs or models, we’ll need to come up with a better naming scheme… I’m taking suggestions for names and themes.

Figment ArtsFest in New York

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On Saturday, June 12, several OLPC supporters trekked out to New York City’s Governor’s Island for this month’s New York meet-up. OLPC Volunteer Hannah Stern talks about the day’s events:

This past weekend, One Laptop per Child’s New York group spent the day at the Figment Arts and Creativity Festival on Governor’s Island, right off the southern tip of Manhattan. Throughout the day, festival goers had the chance to show off their creative sides on the XOs, whether through producing their own digital art or music.

Costumed festival attendee tries out OLPC

The Festival was my first OLPC event and I didn’t know what to expect. Based on what I knew about OLPC advocates, I had pictured a conference room full of IT managers talking tech, writing code, and developing new open source applications.

However, our audience was nothing like what I had envisioned. I was pleasantly surprised to find our setup to be more like a neighborhood block party. Lots of people and families passed by, asking questions about the XO and stopping to play with the devices.

This was my first time getting some hands-on experience with the XO in its many forms (several of the volunteers brought their own XO models from the past several years). After a few quick pointers, I found the operating system and program functions fairly intuitive and had a great time trying it out.

As much as I enjoyed playing with the XO, I had an even better time watching other people use it. There’s no question that my favorite part of the day was watching the adults and kids each take their turn trying to open the laptops.

After about a minute of fumbling, the adults would look at us, clearly frustrated, and ask “I don’t know, can you just show me.”  The kids on the other hand caught on right away, looking for moving parts and typically prying open the devices in less time than the adults.

While I had always thought that the primary purpose of the XOs is to teach kids to use the Internet or to type faster, this simple demonstration proved otherwise. It showed just how the XO is built to stimulate the creative and reason areas of a child’s brain. It’s about teaching them to think logically but creatively; its’ about teaching them how to get the most out of the tools available to them.

The OLPC-NYC grassroots community welcomes you to hang out and/or join us anytime!

Stories from Rwanda schools

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Julia has posted a half-dozen recent updates to her excellent Rwanda blog, about her work, thoughts on access to knowledge, and efforts with the Kigali Institute of Education. She includes some interesting photos of students showing off their Etoys storybooks and drawings.

She also reminded me of the CMU student group that visited Nonko School last month to run classroom workshops – an interesting model of community service.

Pennsylvania’s Charter School success

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The Chester Community Charter School in Chester, Pennsylvania, with roughly 2500 students, is the largest pilots of XOs in a charter school, and one of the largest single-school pilots in the US. They began in 2008 with 1400 students in 6th through 8th grades, and have since added over 600 more students in 3rd through 5th grades.

They planned their infrastructure and teacher preparation carefully — adding a high-bandwidth network connections within their school to handle the dramatic increase in Internet usage they expected, and running regular workshops with the head teachers from their 3 initial grades to develop new materials to make use of laptops in and out of the class.  And they have engaged city and state policymakers and other potential supporters in their area from the beginning.

I helped them with the initial deployment and a school-wide demonstration we gave to the students — and I still remember the joy with which they glommed onto the new machines; the teachers full of ideas after some brainstorming, and the students pepped by our demonstration of a competitive two-player Maze session.  They recently asked to test out the 1.5 and future tablet models, and seem to be growing their student body steadily at over 10% a year.  I hope to visit with their teachers again soon to see how this has changed their views of teaching.

How classroom XOs can help Rwanda’s economy

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Rwanda aims to complete deployment of their next 100,000 children by next summer. National project coordinator Nkubito Bakuramutsa was interviewed this week for an article in the Irish Times.

They discuss recent successes and policies at the Rwandan schools that have deployed the first batch of XOs in the country. Kagame and the teachers involved are both optimistic that they will transform their society into a leader in technology advances. Kagame aims to triple the nation’s economic output over the next 10 years.