One More Year in our mission to provide a learning device to every child in the world.
We celebrate our 30th Anniversary of dedication to Technology and Education in Third World Countries.
Here a 2012 review and our best wishes.
The eKindling project, a classroom XO project on the island of Lubang in the Philippines, is making good progress. They are supported by roughly 100 donors and organizers from across the Philippines. After a consultation visit this past winter, they recently purchased XOs for their school. They wrote up a project checklist, a 5-day teacher workshop schedule, and formed contacts with OLPC Friends, OLPC New Zealand, and Squeakland.
Recently they published a debrief of their weeklong teacher workshop. You can follow this and other progress through updates to their project page (thanks to Mafe and others).
Children in remote communities in Western Australia and the Northern Territory are being introduced to the digital world with their own XOs as part of an international program aimed at boosting attendance. They have been localized to include the local language of Yolgnu Matha. From an announcement last month as the project was being rolled out:
Mr Lacey was hopeful the laptops would increase the current attendance rate of about 360 students regularly attending out of 500.
“We want to use it as an incentive, come to school….” At Rawa Community School, near the Great Sandy Desert 600km southeast of Port Hedland in Western Australia, the laptops will mean learning can be better adapted to each student.
It will be interesting to see how this fits into the plans of Geoff Anson and the crew at OLPC Australia. Meanwhile, Pia Waugh of OLPC Friends has joined the Government 2.0 movement in the Australian government and can offer a perspective from both sides of that fence.