A successful Contributors Program project: Rehnuma School in Karachi

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If you haven’t seen this blog and this YouTube video from the OLPC Contributors Program project run by Talat Kahn and Carol Ruth Silver in Pakistan, you need to check it out! Watch the video and explore some of the creative ways the teachers and students are using XOs in their school.

This began as a 10 XO Contributors Program project and I was privileged to be their mentor. (Since then they found funding for over 100 XOs and are looking to grow.) And their class experiences and blog have been an inspiration to other teachers around the world. I did give them some help getting started and a couple of “lessons” via Skype, but after that, they ran with it! Notice the enthusiastic local community involvement that has helped make this project the success that it is.

P.S. Carol and Talat are members of the OLPC San Francisco Community. They are also the ones that introduced many of us (myself included) to the Khan Academy videos. We all learn from each other!

Miguel Brechner on technology and teachers

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Miguel Brechner, the compelling head of Plan Ceibal, gives a talk about the impact of the Uruguayan program, which has now reached almost 500,000 children and teachers in the country. He discusses impacts on the lives of children, plans for the future, and empowering teachers. (He also seems to be experiencing a revelation of epic proportions in the opening sequence of this video.)

Presentation, Part 1 | Part 2

From his talk:

“There is no magic here. Ceibal will not solve Uruguay’s problems, but it is a technology that can help us solve them.”

“En Uruguay hay dos banderas: la primera la selección uruguaya de fútbol, y la segunda el Plan Ceibal.“

Paving the road to connectivity

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Alice Rawsthorn follows up on her earlier pieces on OLPC with an short, sweet article in yesterday’s New York Times. “A Few Stumbles on the Road to Connectivity” offers a summary of OLPC’s work and development over the past three years. She touches on many of the changing expectations about the project, by supporters and detractors, over the years, noting that initial detractors worried we would distort the commercial market, or impede other humanitarian projects. But both commercial and other humanitarian projects in education and technology have grown, even in countries where OLPC has reached every school and is a significant part of the annual education or technology budget.

The larger story, often lost in the drama of competing yet similar programs, is the global change wrought by universal connectivity projects. UCPN, Ceibal, Canaima, Connectar Igualdad, Magelhan, Aakash — all are variations on the essential theme. That will soon have transformed education in most of the world. The question is, which regions will still be left out?

Powerful ideas in Brazil: Etoys authoring and conceptual development

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Etoys is one of the most powerful tools on the XO — in terms of what it can do, how flexibly it can be used, and how it helps guide and facilitate thinking. This blog post from long-time OLPCer Sylvia Kist shows some of the research that has been done with children and Etoys on the XO.

Can programming on Squeak Etoys on the XO laptop help students develop concepts about the Big Bang theory? Or about phenomena such as the Lunar Eclipse? About breast cancer?

Working with Brazilian children and investigating their production, researchers from the Laboratory of Cognitive Studies of the Institute of Psychology of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (LEC/UFRGS) have been examining the potential of programming activity on Squeak Etoys for authoring and conceptual development.

This past November, part of this investigation was presented in a paper at the XXII Brazilian Symposium on Computer in Education (SBIE) and XVII Workshop on Informatics at School (WIE) in Aracaju (SE/Brazil), awarded as one of the best papers of the event. The work context was the trial of the Brazilian federal program One Computer per Student (PROUCA) in Porto Alegre, one of the five experiments of the first phase of the project, coordinated by LEC/UFRGS, in which XO laptops were adopted.  (More details after the jump.)

 

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¿La XO es un juguete? / Is the XO a toy?

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Guest post from our amazing OLPC Mexico director Mariana Cortes.
Scroll down for an English translation.

A pencil is only as sharp as the person using it.
On the other hand a good pencil makes a person sharper. #pencilchat

A pesar de estar diseñada para niños, la XO dista mucho de ser un juguete.

Más allá de los impactos educativos y sociales que demuestran que la XO puede ser mucho más que una computadora, la XO ha sido diseñada pensando en que debe tener:

  • un piso bajo: para que niños de cualquier edad puedan usarla no importando su nivel
  • paredes anchas: para que se puedan desarrollar cualquier cantidad de proyectos y actividades
  • un techo alto: para que el cielo sea el límite respecto a su uso y que cuanto imaginemos pueda ser creado

Este último punto tiene un sin fin de ejemplos que pasan desde áreas artísticas, lúdicas e incluso técnicas y científicas y que han sido desarrolladas de manera independiente por personas que han visto en la XO sus grandes capacidades, no solo en su uso como herramienta, sino en LA APLICACIÓN, lo cual hace visible la diferencia del aprendizaje sólo por consumir información vs. el aprendizaje aplicado a través del pensamiento crítico. Por ejemplo:

  • Ciudad Nazca – un proyecto inspirado en lineas de Nazca, consiste en adaptar y programar un vehículo (pequeño tractor), para que trace mediante un arado y en escala real, el mapa de una ciudad o poblado imaginario sobre la superficie del desierto de la costa peruana.

Es un proyecto de land art dirigido por el artista peruano Rodrigo Derteano, que consiste en dibujar el mapa de una ciudad imaginaria en escala real  sobrela superficie del desierto. Para ello se creo un robot, que de manera autónoma va trazando surcos en la tierra mediante un arado.

        “La computadora del proyecto: una XO de OLPC que Escuelab nos presta (one laptop per child). Funciona con 12 voltios, es robusta y la pantalla se puede leer a plena luz del dia.”

La ventaja que tiene la XO sobre otras laptops es la posibilidad de integrar sensores desde el puerto MIC_IN. Gracias a esto, las posibilidades de contar con un laboratorio mobil son infinitas.
  • Física con la XO – Guzmán Trinidad, es un Profesor de Física para niveles de Bachillerato. En el sitio incluye avances en la utilización de la XO (OLPC), como instrumento de medida en el Laboratorio de Física.  Ejemplos en videos aquí.
Se programa en Tortugarte la síntesis de dos sonidos de diferente frecuencia. La salida de auriculares de la XO se conecta a un par de integrados LM567 decodificadores de tono, cada uno de los cuales enciende un led cuando está presente en su entrada la señal de frecuencia adecuada. Con este principio podríamos controlar la conexión/desconexión de cualquier dispositivo en función de la frecuencia que emita la XO.
La página,Quantum Hacking. Y sus autores, Ilja Gerhardt, Qin Liu, Antia Lamas-Linares, Johannes Skaar, Christian Kurtsiefer y Vadim Makarov. ¿Qué fue lo que ellos hicieron? Implementaron por vez primera un dispositivo capaz de obtener la llave de un criptosistema cuántico, sin revelar su presencia a ninguno de los participantes, emisor y receptor en los extremos de la comunicación. Esto es hacking cuántico con XO, señoras y señores. (Publicación de ALT1040…leer el resto aquí)


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OLPC Rwanda Report: Transforming society through access to modern education

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As we mentioned yesterday, OLPC Rwanda now has an excellent project summary (pdf) online. It covers the first three years of the national initiative and the related development of Rwanda’s primary schools.

The report captures the spirit and challenges of country-wide change. It addresses the major phases of the project, and the background in government policy and vision, without diving into too much detail.

 

A recent teacher's workshop in Rulindo, Rwanda

A summary, to whet your appetite:

In 2000, under the leadership of President Paul Kagame, Rwanda established 20-year objectives to transform the country into an industrial/service-based economy. This VISION 2020 plan specifies short-, medium- and long-term goals with measurable indicators of progress.

The plan relies on six pillars, the second being human resource development & a knowledge-based economy, and three horizontal areas, the third being science & technology.

In 2001, only one of the country’s 2,300 primary schools had any computers at all.  By 2005, 1,138 schools had at least one PC, 40 schools in Kigali had Internet access, and connectivity was being rolled out to other schools.  Over 1,000 teachers had been trained in computer literacy, from 120 primary schools.

Rwanda announced in January 2007 it would work with One Laptop per Child.  In 2008, it received 10,000 XOs [thanks primarily to our generous donors and the G1G1 program].

In early 2010, the government purchased 65,000 XO laptops so that schools in every school district could begin receiving laptops for P4-P6 students. This purchase was financed by the sale of cellular licenses to Tigo and Korea Telecom, working with the government to extend broadband connectivity nationwide.  They have since purchased another 35,000 XOs, and plan to deploy another 400,000 over the next 5 years. Today the program has a 27-person core team, plus 5 staff from OLPC, working on the project.

The Ministry of Education started with 150 schools, and asked the headmaster and a teacher of their choice to come to Kigali for one week of intensive training. They subsequently spent four days at each school to work with the teachers and students, and one day for community awareness meetings.

Ministry representatives held meetings with local Parent Teacher Associations and local authorities, explaining how laptops would be integrated into the classroom. They also went on radio and TV and write newspaper articles to discuss the project.

 

Parents at a PTA meeting introducing the XO

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