GoGoNews kids’ news activity to ship with Sugar

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GoGoNews, a site providing news summaries for kids, is developing an XO activity to showcase their news.   Like the older NewsReader activity, it will offer regular updates from its online feed.   OLPC plans to ship the activity with future XOs, in English and Spanish.

The activity is scheduled to be done by February.  GoGoNews founder Golnar Khosroshawi says of the project “Together we will equip children with relevant technology and content, regardless of location, to promote learning and understanding, not just of academics, but of people, countries and cultures.”

For details, see the press release in English and Spanish.

OLPC Rwanda takes off

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Update: the OLPC Rwanda 2011 report is out!

OLPC Rwanda (twitter) has grown steadily since its launch a few years ago, and is now part of early education in every school district in the country. Rwanda aims to become a technical and Web powerhouse, and has remained true to that vision. Today they are in some ways the most technically advanced country in the region (to the chagrin of neighboring Kenya, which also hopes to be the hub for software and technology development in East Africa). Rwanda is preparing to double the size of the OLPC project in the country over the coming year, now that they have a smoothly-running system in place.

Happily for us (and for future deployments), the country team has put together a beautiful report on their first three years of work, which will come out tomorrow. It is concise and written for a general audience, with a fine balance of perspectives, from political and financial to the needs of teachers and PTAs.

In related news, Joseph and Erize, the two boys who made their own business cards for their OLPC outreach efforrts in Kigali, saw that we wrote about them on the blog last week, and left comments of their own welcoming questions from all of you. 🙂

New Scientist interviews Nicholas about the no-intervention literacy experiment

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Vijaysree Venkatraman of the New Scientist interview Nicholas about the pilot experiment to see how access to a tablet with books and appropriate software can help children learn in the absence of structured intervention (like an enforced class at a school).   They cover the potential sites for the eventual project, and the pre-pilot beginning next month.

It’s offers a quick overview of the effort, from the audience (5-8 yr olds) to infrastructure and power issues, to the timeline for assessment of the results (2 years).   Sugata Mitra is helping designing the minimally invasive pilots and will oversee the one in India.

Piedmont School District in Alabama on their 1:1 laptop program

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Matt Akin, superintendent of the Piedmont City Schools (not far from Birmingham), talks about their long-running 1:1 Mpower program, working with Stanford and iTunes U, partnership with the entire local community, and the impact on the students.   They have three K-12 schools in the district, and children take laptops home with them starting in Grade 4.

“every student at Piedmont has the opportunity of taking French, German, or Chinese, instead of just taking Spanish. And if they want to get ahead, they can take two years in one.

Our students pay a $50 insurance fee. If they’re low income and they can’t afford the fee, we feel strongly that everyone should have something invested, so a student may pay $2 a month. 

I contacted the professor at Stanford because I think the videos are probably three or four years old and said, “It sure would be nice if we could have your stuff.” He sent us all his PowerPoints, his coding requirements, and solutions.

A great interview by Stephen Noonoo.  (Is it wrong of me to want to CamelCase his last name?)  Encore!

Rwandan OLPC mentors: students with business cards

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Back in May, we held an international Scratch Day event in our office called “Rwandese Kids Scratching their Communities.” This event had local students familiar with Scratch, an interactive programming activity on the XO laptop, planning and holding their own workshop. They taught teachers, family members and anyone else who came how to create Scratch projects.

This day was open to all and many new children found their way into our offices to learn more about Scratch and the XO laptop. Two such boys were Joseph (grade 3, 10 yrs old) and Erize (grade 2, 11 yrs old).

In the months that followed, Joseph and Erize kept coming to our offices (near
their houses) to use the laptops. During this time, they not only mastered use of the laptop, they spread word to their friends, and now help and guide other children who have begun coming to the office. Their homes have become popular places with family and friends coming each night to learn more and use the laptops.

The boys had been reserved and quiet, but are now outgoing and confident. Their English has expanded from a few sentences to conversational in just a few weeks. It is clear their work with the laptop has empowered them. They are so happy to be involved with OLPC, that they have each created their own business card and tell everyone in the neighborhood that they work for OLPC!

Joseph and Erize, on their own, chronicled through pictures an afternoon of themselves and their families at home with their laptops:


School computer labs passing out of favor

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Mike Trucano, in a typically balanced and measured World Bank blog post, notes that computer labs are coming under increasing scrutiny — and that despite decades of use in the developed world, there is little evidence for them being an effective use of resources given today’s options for discovering computing, learning to use software tools, or connecting to the internet.

Expert opinion, at least in many OECD countries, is increasingly calling into question the reliance on school computer labs as the primary model for impactful use of educational technologies.

He notes the common arguments for teaching with or building computer labs, a countervailing shift towards personal and mobile computing, and the history of the concept.  A good read, and a strong argument for the need for long-term studies to compare and contrast various options without prejudice — so that we cannot again say, decades from now, “The evidence base in support of  <this educational and technological model> is, to my knowledge, not very robust… there is still not a lot of rigorously obtained hard data that we can point to.” We shouldn’t be able to say that about any significant aspect of educational life.

That sort of ignorance in science, business, politics or economics would be utterly unacceptable.  We should demand more, not less, for our own education — which underlies our capacity to pursue the rest.