One Laptop Per Child Graduate students Academy Program

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One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a non-profit global social entrepreneurship founded by M. Nicholas Negroponte and first conceived at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. OLPC designs, manufactures and distributes children early education platforms consisting of rugged, low cost and powerful “XO laptops” combined with rich and empowering educational activities.

Since its inception, OLPC strives to reduce the gap between the digital world and the world of knowledge, reaching out to 6 – 12 years old underprivileged children with an empowering educational platform for self-learning. Over 2.7 million children in 45 countries use their XO laptop to learn in schools and at home.

OLPC Academy Program

The OLPC Academy program was launched in 2010 to provide University students with the opportunity to travel across the world and support the development and growth of a global and inclusive education for children. The OLPC Academy targets students at the Masters and PhD programs in in the specialty fields of:

  • Computer science;
  • Information and communication technologies;
  • Economy and Business administration;
  • Political science;
  • Education and learning;
  • Social science and Psychology.

The participants are placed in target communities to work at the frontier between education and technology. The students are active actors in creating and enhancing education opportunities for of the world’s poorest children.

Focus Areas

The OLPC Academy program exposes students to exceptional research and fieldwork opportunities. Students can partake in a range of project areas for a period of two months to one year, with potential to receive academic credit. There are five core focus areas within the Academy;

Pre-field and field assessment – Students conduct in-depth studies and interviews to define the education baseline and landscape in countries post OLPC deployment projects.

Monitoring and evaluation – Students track the progress of existing deployment projects; an exercise which aims to report the impact of the projects and support applications for funding.

Curriculum development – One of OLPC’s founding pillars is constructionism; learning should allow children to explore, create and share. Participants will work with country partners to develop and implement innovative curriculums, tailored to specific locations and demographics.

Technical support – Technical support teams will work with country partners on projects such as implementing laptop repair centers, designing support infrastructure, developing software programming and advancing the use of the school server.

Social inclusion & sustainability – Targets the development and the learning skills for children with special needs, indigenous languages and children with disabilities.

Special student proposals – Covers work and research proposals adjacent to OLPC focus areas, include more than one area or have the potential to evolve into a subject of interest for OLPC.

 Participating and Potential Locations

Mexico, Rwanda, US, Cameron, Armenia, Honduras, Peru, Canada, Uruguay, Nicaragua, Argentina, Paraguay, Costa Rica, Colombia, South Africa, Chile, China, India, Brazil and other countries.

 Benefits and Rewards

The OLPC Academy program offers beyond personal satisfaction when helping underprivileged children access quality education, other benefits and rewards including:

 

  • Credited contribution to the OLPC mission
  • Life experience and foot print in a community
  • Unique experiential research environment
  • Direct contact with the host communities
  • Live experience of laptop deployment projects
  • Logistic and financial support
  • Contacts with government and NGOs officials
  • Sponsored gathering at MIT event for program kickoff

Application Timeline and Program Start

To Join the Program

OLPC Academy team looks forward to hearing from motivated and committed students willing to experience a unique and life enriching experience.

XO at school: building shared knowledge – lessons learned

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In this link you can download an e-book written by Professor Valente’s group at UNICAMP about the usage of the XO in one school.

The book registers the research done by his group with 520 XO’s donated by OLPC in 2009/10, around a participatory methodology to deploy laptops at schools.

The book is in portuguese only.

 

This book chronicles some search results “ XO in school and beyond: a proposal for semiochemical participatory technology, education and society“developed in EMEF Fr Emilio Miotti, Campinas (SP), between 2009 and 2012.Considering that digital technology has transformed the way we interact, communicate and live in contemporary society, the school as an institution and social organization, can not remain oblivious to these changes. In this space, building knowledge and skills sets technology serves as a catalyst for change. The book summarizes the studies and proposed solutions to problems raised by members of the school community – teachers, administrators, students, parents and researchers – from the use of a participatory methodology based guided the deployment of laptops through educational settings where technological resources are used in a significant way to school and bringing benefits to society.

Authors: 
Maria Cecilia Calani Baranauskas, Maria Cecilia Martins, Rosangela de Assis (Orgs.)

Via: Juliano Bittencourt

OLPC trains the teaching team in Honduras

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The OLPC team conducted a training program with the Educatrachos teachers team from November 12 to 15, 2012 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. The training focused on integrating the Sugar Activities into the existing curriculum with an emphasis on Spanish and Mathematics. Teachers were instructed on the various teaching resources contained within the XO laptops.

The OLPC program in Honduras will benefit 54,000 students in grades 3 to 6 in 545 schools throughout the country. These students will all have access to XO laptops and digital educational programs.
This program is funded by the Inter-American Development Bank in coordination with the Government of Honduras.

The main goal of the Elementary Education and Technology Integration Program is to improve the learning of students in the poorest elementary schools in Honduras. The program will involve training activities and will provide ongoing support to the teachers. In addition, the program is working to provide textbooks and other educational materials to these schools. The project has a special focus on the incorporation of new technologies in education.

Melissa Henriquez (OLPC educational coordinator) and Patricia Rivera (Gerente Pedagógico Unidad Coordinadora de Programas y Proyectos UCP-BID)

OLPC looking for students to participate in the Sugar Labs Google Code-In event

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Sugar Labs has been selected as one of ten projects to participate in Google Code In. We join, among others, our colleagues at Fedora et al., in soliciting the participation of high-school (and in our case, middle-school) students to work on projects during a six-week sprint beginning on November 26. This is a great chance for the youth who have been so instrumental in our growth over the past year to show off their talents to the world (and two of them will hopefully win a trip to visit Google). Please help Chris Leonard and Walter Bender finalize the project and mentor lists over the next few days. We are offering coding projects, documentation and training projects, outreach, quality assurance, and user interface, so even if you are not a developer, you likely have some skills to devote to the Code In.

NOTE TO MENTORS: Please create an account and fill out the Request to be a Mentor form.

NOTE TO COMMUNITY: Please add to our task lists and please recruit participants.

Why we are participating

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

If you are interested visit wiki.sugarlabs to read the details.