Tag Archives: Canada

Animated Video and Call to Action – @OLPCCanada

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The OLPC Canada team is excited to share a new animated video highlighting some of the inspiring outcomes when Aboriginal students are connected with educational technology. Please help us build awareness of this initiative by sharing this video on Facebook and Twitter and liking it on Youtube.

OLPC Canada provides 21st century educational tools to Aboriginal students nationwide. To date, they have connected more than 60 Aboriginal education programs and 9,000 students to technology designed with children in mind. Please help raise awareness about this initiative by sharing this video. It takes a network to connect a child.

Learn more at: www.olpccanada.com

Laptops in Saskatchewan go home!

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In Canada, the national OLPC project continues to expand into the homes of students and teachers; this week including Saskatchewan.

It is a pleasure to spend the week with Kakisiwew School of Ochapowace First Nation – home of OLPC Canada Technical Coordinator, Justin Bear. Justin founded and runs the community cyber cafe/youth zone, provides tech support to the elementary school, teaches classes with the XO and is the central contact for technically based OLPC Canada inquiries from our sites across the nation.

More details about the students and their work with the dance activity Swift Feet on the Canada blog.

Canada’s Eastern Townships make good use of olpc

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The school board of Eastern Townships, Canada, under Ron Canuel, has been pursuing a one laptop per child school program for over eight years, today reaching roughly 2,700 students and teachers.   A research paper recently released by Karsenti and Collin suggests their decision to give children their own laptops was a primary cause of the student’s success to date, which has included a 40% reduction in their dropout rate over 4 years.

While they aren’t using XOs in their classroom, I’ve met some of their team more than once and shown them around our offices; they were certainly right at home.  It’s great to see this sort of long-baseline research coming out.  The only thing better would be similar research from many different facets of the same country or environment, as I hope we will see from Uruguay in another year.

OLPC Canada and Canadian Sugar (Maple Syrup?) announced

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The Belinda Stronach Foundation has launched a new OLPC Canada website describing their current plans, partners, and development of learning materials (and a new Sugar-like interface using aboriginal designs…)

Thanks are due to BMO Financial and the Ontario government, and the other partners who helped bring the TBSF plans to fruition – most recently with a $750,000 grant. They have published a map of the schools involved in their first-round pilot (some 2800 students and teachers in all), and are planning to expand it to 5000 participants before it ends.

It’s great to see all of these developments in North America at last. Mexico is also seeing an expansion of their program into Nayarit on the western coast, with their initial workshops beginning soon.