Revision as of 16:57, 16 August 2008

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Country Meetings

Community News

For the latest updates from the various teams, subscribe to the mailing list, or check the archived updates here.

Week of August 12

http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/2008-August/000139.html

India: Nicholas and David Cavallo spent Monday in Mumbai with Satish Jha, president of OLPC India, under the aegis of Reliance. The day’s events included a national video conference, a meeting with Johny Joseph, chief secretary of the state of Maharashtra and a lecture to the Asia Society. Maharashtra is huge, with 100 million people, or about 10 percent of India’s total population.

On Tuesday, Reliance and the Digital Bridge Foundation organized a one-day workshop for teachers, laptop donees and volunteers. The goal was to provide a basic understanding of the XO and the OLPC approach to learning in a saturated deployment. The program motivated many attendees to launch new XO deployments and also to improve existing XO sites in India.

On Wednesday a similar workshop was held in Goa, organized by Dr. Rita Paes, the director of a local teachers’ college, and sponsored by the Goa Chamber of Commerce. Just as in Mumbai, more people and sites were engaged. With the support of local business and the teachers’ college, they will pursue a statewide deployment initiative for Goa, which already is advanced in providing connectivity and computers to schools.

Nicholas, David, Satish, Manusheel Gupta and the Reliance team also visited the remote Vastishala Khairat-Dhangarvada School, 81 km from Mumbai, where Carla Gómez Monroy deployed XOs some months ago. The children sang for their visitors, and presented them with red roses. Sandeep Surve, Khairat’s single teacher, believes deeply in the OLPC program. “Education through XOs has completely solved educational problems like child absenteeism, parent-teacher interaction, and lack of interest towards education,” he said. “Children relish coming to school every day, and their interest towards education has risen dramatically.”

Haiti: It was a busy week at OLPC Haiti as the team wrapped up the summer camp at Republique de Chili. Every major television and radio station came out as well as several government officials, including the ministers of education and communication and public works. One of the second graders showed off her problem-solving skills to the minister of education. When her computer lost power as she was attempting to demonstrate her very impressive work in E-toys, the student ran to charge her laptop while a reporter held the minister's attention. Within five minutes she returned with a gentle tug on the minister’s sleeve, excited and determined to display her work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9T1hLfcy_xI

At the end of camp, the teachers wrote reports on their personal XOs for the Ministry of Education. They were uniformly enthusiastic about the program, and training team, and impressed with how the kids easily worked with one another. They thought the training period was too short, that the students’ parents should have been more involved and they asked for more content.

The team spent the rest of the week working on the operations manual. This was both a content-driven task and a team-building exercise, led by national coordinator Guy-Serge Pompilus, and organized into three parts - administration, technology and pedagogy.

The translation of Pootle is now 67 percent complete, and the core system is 97 percent finished. Translation of the Getting Started OLPC guide is in progress, and the team is double-checking the current translation because many volunteers did not use Haitian kryol. They also have started to translate Scratch, as well as finish Etoys.

Rwanda: This week saw the first teachers’ development workshop, conducted from Wednesday to Sunday in the Regional ICT Research and Training Center. Sixty-five teachers participated from the three launch schools in the districts of Kagugu, Nonki and Rwamagana.

The core team involved the teachers in simple XO activities, such as using the camera, text editor, and Speak. They explored mobility by taking activities outside the classroom. The main goal was to break any initial fear among the teachers, and to make them comfortable with exploring the laptop by themselves. They also used more complex tools such as Scratch, doing basic programming to create short dialogs in a very playful way.

The experience was valuable to the core team, too, for they will be the ones to provide long-term support as the deployment expands to more schools. The OLPC team feels they are gaining broader acceptance from other ministries and organizations. The national coordinator, the primary participants, the core team, and the OLPC team continue to develop a strong collaboration. People are very enthusiastic.

Week of August 4

http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/2008-August/000138.html

Thailand: OLPC held a five-day regional workshop in Bangkok, with more than 50 participants from six countries. The goals of the workshop were to:

gain a deeper and more pragmatic familiarity with the ideas about laptops and learning from both a micro scale (child-level) and macro scale (national level)

form next steps for laptop introduction in participating countries

strengthen network among countries in the region

The workshop went extremely well. Special highlights included sharing of work in the rural areas in Thailand as exemplars of high-quality work, and integration of school and community; storytelling with the XO by Barbara Barry; computational uses of the XO by Roger Sipitakiat; Nicholas’s talk on Thursday evening; and the Ban Samkha children’s orchestra using their XOs to play traditional Thai music in TamTam. Along with the Thais, delegations from Bangla Desh and Malaysia both committed to purchase laptops.

Mongolia: The team returned on Monday afternoon from a two-week tour in northern Mongolia, where they ran workshops for local teachers, kids and parents. Together with the Mongolian core team, we worked in one city center and two small villages, introducing the XO and constructionist learning methodologies. The core team teachers designed and ran the last workshop on their own. They came up with some wonderful and surprising ideas, including a physical activity to teach angles and degrees to students, which they then try in turtle art and etoys. It was amazing to watch.

Tyler worked with the IT team to set up servers in two of the villages that will be receiving laptops. Neither location had school connectivity, but the network worked well.

Nicholas joined us in Khatgal, a small village in the Khuvsgul province on our last day of training. A sheep was slaughtered and cooked in his honor.

It was interesting to note the various dignitaries’ motivations for involvement in the project. The new head of ICTA, for example, was inspired by the XO’s open source environment. He wants the students in Mongolia to learn Linux and is working to get all government agencies and higher institutes to cross over to a Linux platform.

The prime minister mentioned how moved he was to see children from a poor district in UB receive their individual computers. He felt the project not only will change education, but also what he called the "mental" state of poor children who see their neighbors with the luxuries of life while they go hungry.

Rwanda: The 20-member core team is ready to initiate teacher development. The team discussed ways of introducing generative themes for children to use for developing projects. There also was considerable discussion on the issues of working with schools and communities.

Haiti: The team is currently wrapping up the pre-pilot Camp XO 2008 at Ecole Nationale Republique du Chili. As we entered this final full week we began to look at E-toys.

In our weekly meeting with the teachers, T1 teachers asked what type of assistance they would receive to better understand integration of the XOs into their curriculum. They are naturally concerned because the XO is such a novel tool, so different from their previous experience. The team has been trying to explain to the teachers that their goal shouldn't be to know the technology better than the students, but to seek ways to utilize the tools to further learning objectives and enhance the overall learning experience.

In the tech team meeting, we identified local sources of solar panels for each school that may need them. It is still difficult to determine which schools will receive decent internet connection because of Haiti's mountainous terrain.

Week of July 28

http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/2008-July/000136.html

Rwanda:Preparations continue for the distribution of the first five thousand laptops. The core team completed translation of Sugar and Scratch into Kinyarwanda, the Rwandan national language. They received digitized textbooks for most grades and started the scanning process for the remaining books. They also were able to reduce the PDF file size more than 16 times, making it possible to load several books inside the XOs. The school selection process goes on. It is a challenge to match community saturation with available electricity. Carine Umutesi from RITA and Eugene Karangwa from the ministry of education are searching hard for such a cluster of schools. The scheduled date for laptop distribution is August 11th.

Haiti: The core team is wrapping up Camp XO 2008 at Ecole Nationale Republique du Chile. On July 31st, the last day of camp, the kids will display their work and demonstrate their skills to several officials and the media. Thursday, August 1st, will be parents’ day.

The team also is running full speed in preparation for the start of school in September. They have decided to go with solar panels. This week, they will visit two schools in the region as part of the XO school selection process.

Mongolia: Nicholas visited the scenic Lake Khuvsgul region, where he met with the Mongolian team at the end of their latest rural swing - three stops in the north. The village/town has a population of 2000. The team includes six Mongolian teachers from Ulaanbaatar who are being trained to carry on the learning workshops as more laptops roll out at the beginning of the school year in September. Nicholas meets President Nambaryn Enkhbayar on Tuesday to press for full deployment, every child in the country, as in Uruguay.

Perú: Kim Quirk visited the Chavalina School in Chincha, a poor community of 50,000 located about 200 km south of Lima. Chavalina and three other Chincha schools were selected by the ministry of education to receive XOs. Her report:

“Chincha was hit very hard by the earthquake last August, and they are still rebuilding the school and many homes in the town. The school we visited has 70 students, aged six to 12, in three classrooms with three teachers.

“The teachers are very excited about the laptops, the program, and the fact that their students were selected to participate. The kids are obviously excited about the laptops and showed us how they are using the machines - write, record, paint, puzzles, memory, and more.

“They received their XOs in late April, and already have had five or six problems with the 70 machines deployed, which has made it a little difficult for them. When a laptop breaks, the child goes without. It also takes a long time to charge the laptops as they only have one working electrical outlet, and one power strip. There is little direct sunlight in Chincha for four to five months out of the year, so solar is not a good option.

“They have no Internet connectivity, so this might be a good place for us to help get Telefonica involved.

“We discussed with them the formal process for submitting a repair or spare parts request, so they could do their own repairs. We also suggested that all the Chincha schools form one repair center.”

More details:http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Chincha

More pictures from Chincha:

http://flickr.com/photos/kentquirk/sets/72157606353435234/

India: Satish Jha, OLPC India’s CEO and president, has started working with Manusheel Gupta. Satish will be formally introduced locally be Nicholas on August 4 during OLPC India Day. (See poster below)

Satish already is discussing a customs duty exemption for the XO with government officials, and will pursue the subject in upcoming contacts with various agencies, including the Ministry of Finance.

Nepal: Rabi Karmacharya reports “the government of Nepal has allocated three million rupees in this year's budget for the One Laptop per Child project. It is not a huge amount, but it is a significant step by the government to indicate that they are seriously considering OLPC in Nepal. We are now insisting that the Department of Education seek more funding from donors to implement One Laptop per Child in two districts. We have told them that Open Learning Exchange Nepal will take care of piloting in three other districts.”

Week of July 21

http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/2008-July/000135.html

Haiti: The students at Republic de Chile School continue to have a great time exploring with their XOs. The fifth graders erupted with joy as they discovered

“YouTube” during their continued exploration of electricity. They ran around to the other kids and teachers to show off their discovery. The fifth grade teacher expressed concern whether her students fully understood all the information about electricity that they were getting online.

The fourth graders spent the first half of the week analyzing their video interviews of their family and community as part of their transportation study. Several of them were unable to complete their interviews because their parents, fearing for their safety, required the children to hide their XOs when outside of school. There was some discussion among the teachers whether parents are hindering learning in their efforts to protect their children.

The third and second graders spent the first half of the week learning how to create their own game in Memorize. Accustomed to old top-down pedagogy, it took some time for them to let their creative instincts take over. Not to be left out, the first graders showed off their writing and articulation skills (see image below).

During the second half of the week, the Haitian core team and Wanda Eugene of OLPC took a trip up the mountain to meet with the teachers, directors, and administrators in Jacmel, the next site where the XOs will be distributed. Thursday morning, they visited Cap Rouge, which is a wifi-ready city, in the region of Jacmel, where this is no electricity and whose public primary school has an enrollment of more than 700 students. The school itself is solar powered.

The teachers, directors and administrators were really receptive and asked some big questions, such as, How will the XOs transform education for everyone?

Rwanda: Juliano Bittencourt met with Théoneste Mutsindashyaka, the state secretary for primary and secondary education, who re-affirmed his commitment to the project and stated that Rwanda will be expanding its commitment next year. Mutsindashyaka also has decided that the deployment in Rwanda should start by saturation of Kigali, the capital city of the country where electricity is available.

Juliano also briefly met with Daphrosa Gahakwa, the minister of education, and Nkubito Manzi Bakuramutsa, executive director of the Rwanda Information Technology Authority - RITA. Mr. Nkubito shared his enthusiasm for hosting a regional OLPC workshop in the country and offered total support.

The RITA team has translated 96 percent of Sugar into Kinyarwanda. They are now working to improve the quality of the translation. The Rwandan core team and the OLPC team began started to work with Scratch in order to give them a better understanding of the tool before beginning its translation. The team also gained access to the digital version of the text books used in Rwandan schools. Together with the staff from RITA, we are studying the best way to load this content inside the laptops

Birmingham: The team continued to work with youth at the Birmingham Public Library to learn about diagnosing problems with the laptops as well as experimenting with their disassembly.

They held meetings with the technical project manager to discuss a plan for bringing laptops to all the primary schools. They will meet with the city’s curriculum leader next week to continue to work on the professional development plan.

The summer camp is going well. Students have formed into groups and plan to create projects addressing health issues from diabetes to nutrition. They intend to make commercials and games in Scratch to help educate the community about their chosen healthcare topic.

Mongolia: The core team and the OLPC group went to the countryside in the north of Mongolia to begin delivering laptops and to work with children, teachers and parents. Due to lack of connectivity in the region, the full report will arrive in the next two weeks.

Cambridge': The group developed more materials for doing solid learning projects using the programming languages available on the XO for distribution to the countries.

Week of July 14

http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/2008-July/000134.html

Haiti: OLPC Haiti made significant progress with children and teachers using generative themes to guide beginning to develop projects on their laptops. What started as a simple discussion of a television show that several kids could not watch because they had no electricity at home, turned into a fifth graders’ project to explore electricity. Using the XOs, they developed thought-provoking questions about electricity. Then, armed with their laptops as recording devices, they went out into the community to interview residents.

Not to be outdone, the fourth graders tackled the question of transportation. They broke up into groups to explore a wide range of problems and solutions, including rising fuel costs.

The third graders began their exploration of music using TamTam. The focus on music allowed them a chance to express their favorite music styles, artists and instruments, which gave them a unique way to connect learning to their culture.

Mongolia: The week's work started off with an update from the core team members who’d joined the OLPC team in the Gobi. The team discussed the challenges that face deployment on logistical, educational and support levels. Having experienced the lack of electricity and connectivity first hand, these core team members were now in a better position to address those challenges.

The team noticed how quickly children were able to pick up the programs and how willing teachers and parents in the countryside were to learn from children. Everyone noted how the fears that teachers would be intimidated by the intelligence, pace, and openness of students was ungrounded in the rural areas. In fact, their experiences in the rural areas with children, teachers and parents all working well together and helping each other were liberating and enabled better planning for adoption.

On Monday afternoon the Gobi team prepared some exercises and project ideas based on what they learned from their teaching methodology. They went over the exercises and ideas with the rest of the core team.

The entire core team also worked together to deal with translation issues. Partly it was a team-building exercise, but also the goal was for the national team to take responsibility for the issue and its solution.

The teachers also were encouraged to design what they wanted to learn. Some teachers are quite adept at eToys, and were keen to get to know other programs like Tam Tam and Pippy/python. On Tuesday afternoon we had them break up into groups. Some of them worked with interns Tyler and Cris to learn Pippy.

Rwanda: Juliano Bittencourt and his wife Silvia arrived in country to support the development of the laptop sites and national team. In this first week, they met several times with Carine Umutesi from the Rwanda ICT Agency (RITA), and Eugene Karangwa from the ministry of education in order to create an action plan for the laptops in the schools. The plan covers points such teacher training, deployment logistics and development of community awareness. It also addresses the identification and selection of content to be loaded onto the XOs, as well as the need for a schedule for the start in the first schools.

The creation of a core team that will support schools in the roll out of the project was the most discussed topic, since it is essential for success and growth. RITA set up a team to translate Sugar and the main activities to Kinyarwanda. They started working on Wednesday and so far have translated most of the Sugar-XO and part of the Sugar-Buddle packages in Pootle.

Juliano and Carine Umutesi from RITA met with Desite Alex, from Rwanda National Curriculum Development Center - NCDC, in order to identify available digitized textbooks that can be loaded onto the laptops. Since major publishers do not create materials in most local languages, including Kinyarwanda, NCDC developed and retained copyrights on some textbooks of their own for students in the first through third grades.

Birmingham: The summer workshop at the Glen Iris School has begun with 40 students, who will create projects along the generative theme of educating the community about health issues.

Eighty elementary school teachers went through the first phase of professional development. They responded positively. The next step for them is to work with children in parallel with their own continued learning.

The Birmingham schools received their remaining 14,000 laptops. The city began information sessions at the public library. Various community groups and businesses have joined forces to help students, parents and other community members learn more about the laptops, as well as learn how to do the more straightforward repairs. Plans continue for a large public Expo at the end of the summer term to demonstrate the possibilities, heighten awareness, and build towards citywide impact.

Week of July 6

http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/2008-July/000133.html

Rollout Update: Since November 2007, OLPC has shipped nearly 400,000 laptops. Better than a quarter of those machines went to donors who participated in the G1G1 program. Simultaneously, OLPC has been working with countries to prepare for their donee XOs, many of which already have been received. The two largest rollouts, Peru and Uruguay, account for nearly half of all units shipped to date, but have yet to receive the bulk of their orders.

Papua New Guinea: From June 16tht hrough the 20th, OLPC Oceania made its second PNG deployment (Weekend, June 15) of 47 XOs at the Dreikikir Elementary School in East Sepik Province. Dreikikir is about a four-hour drive inland from Wewak, the provincial capital. The machines were all updated to build 703/G1G1 activity pack with Speak and Flash added before the deployment to the school’s first graders.

Tony Aimo, PNG’s acting minister of education, attended the official launch ceremonies, and repeated the government’s support for the XO program. Aimo announced the government’s commitment to a full saturation deployment of XOs at the school, which has about 500 students.

Acting Minister Aimo arrives for the launch ceremony.

David Leeming and his team spent a day in teacher training. He reports that videos from the deployments in Peru and the Solomon Islands were very helpful. Each teacher who took part in training also received a signed certificate.

[...]

Week of June 30

http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/2008-June/000132.html

Week of June 23

Mongolia

Elana Langer and her team of interns arrived in Ulanbataar on Monday June 16th to join Enky Zurgaanjin and other Mongolian interns. Several immediately began testing and registering computers, while those who speak the local language began assisting in the immense task of translating the interface into Mongolian.

Wonderful partnerships with local organizations such Project Read, the Peace Corps and the local university computer science program were solidified. Each of the organizations has committed two or more people to join our core team for intensive training this summer.

They in turn will build capacity within their organizations to help bring the powerful, effective and enjoyable uses of laptops for learning to children in rural areas. Project Read will soon purchase an additional 2000 computers with grant money from the World Bank.

On Friday there were two official ceremonies at UB schools receiving the laptops. A workshop for 240 teachers is scheduled to begin in the capital on Monday morning.

It is presidential election season in Mongolia and the XO and OLPC figure prominently in the campaign. All candidates support one laptop per child.

Haiti

On Monday the first laptops were distributed to the children of the Republique do Chile school in Port-au-Prince. The children were excited and extremely enthusiastic. They shared activities spontaneously and explored by themselves. They asked many questions of the teachers, of the people from the technical/pedagogical team, and of each other. While waiting for their machines, they formed themselves into an XO.

The spirit among the adults is great. Some of the teachers really “get it,” and we know we can count on them. Bastien Guerry, who has represented OLPC in Haiti, returns to France for a couple of weeks to publish a book. Wanda Eugene will arrive in Haiti at the end of the month, to be joined by Bastien in mid-July.

Nepal

In what its sponsor, the World Food Program, calls the most successful women’s mountaineering expedition in history, a multi-caste team of Nepalese women (Weekend, April 6) carried an XO apiece up to base camp on Mount Everest late last month. At 17,700 feet, this is believed to be a new non-airborne altitude record for the laptop. Before scaling the summit, the women demonstrated their XOs at base camp, where they also formed a mesh network with the machines, which were powered by portable solar arrays.

Press

More articles can be found here.

This page is monitored by the OLPC team.

HowTo [ID# 152927] +/-

Country Meetings

Community News

For the latest updates from the various teams, subscribe to the mailing list, or check the archived updates here.

Week of August 12

http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/2008-August/000139.html

India: Nicholas and David Cavallo spent Monday in Mumbai with Satish Jha, president of OLPC India, under the aegis of Reliance. The day’s events included a national video conference, a meeting with Johny Joseph, chief secretary of the state of Maharashtra and a lecture to the Asia Society. Maharashtra is huge, with 100 million people, or about 10 percent of India’s total population.

On Tuesday, Reliance and the Digital Bridge Foundation organized a one-day workshop for teachers, laptop donees and volunteers. The goal was to provide a basic understanding of the XO and the OLPC approach to learning in a saturated deployment. The program motivated many attendees to launch new XO deployments and also to improve existing XO sites in India.

On Wednesday a similar workshop was held in Goa, organized by Dr. Rita Paes, the director of a local teachers’ college, and sponsored by the Goa Chamber of Commerce. Just as in Mumbai, more people and sites were engaged. With the support of local business and the teachers’ college, they will pursue a statewide deployment initiative for Goa, which already is advanced in providing connectivity and computers to schools.

Nicholas, David, Satish, Manusheel Gupta and the Reliance team also visited the remote Vastishala Khairat-Dhangarvada School, 81 km from Mumbai, where Carla Gómez Monroy deployed XOs some months ago. The children sang for their visitors, and presented them with red roses. Sandeep Surve, Khairat’s single teacher, believes deeply in the OLPC program. “Education through XOs has completely solved educational problems like child absenteeism, parent-teacher interaction, and lack of interest towards education,” he said. “Children relish coming to school every day, and their interest towards education has risen dramatically.”

Haiti: It was a busy week at OLPC Haiti as the team wrapped up the summer camp at Republique de Chili. Every major television and radio station came out as well as several government officials, including the ministers of education and communication and public works. One of the second graders showed off her problem-solving skills to the minister of education. When her computer lost power as she was attempting to demonstrate her very impressive work in E-toys, the student ran to charge her laptop while a reporter held the minister's attention. Within five minutes she returned with a gentle tug on the minister’s sleeve, excited and determined to display her work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9T1hLfcy_xI

At the end of camp, the teachers wrote reports on their personal XOs for the Ministry of Education. They were uniformly enthusiastic about the program, and training team, and impressed with how the kids easily worked with one another. They thought the training period was too short, that the students’ parents should have been more involved and they asked for more content.

The team spent the rest of the week working on the operations manual. This was both a content-driven task and a team-building exercise, led by national coordinator Guy-Serge Pompilus, and organized into three parts - administration, technology and pedagogy.

The translation of Pootle is now 67 percent complete, and the core system is 97 percent finished. Translation of the Getting Started OLPC guide is in progress, and the team is double-checking the current translation because many volunteers did not use Haitian kryol. They also have started to translate Scratch, as well as finish Etoys.

Rwanda: This week saw the first teachers’ development workshop, conducted from Wednesday to Sunday in the Regional ICT Research and Training Center. Sixty-five teachers participated from the three launch schools in the districts of Kagugu, Nonki and Rwamagana.

The core team involved the teachers in simple XO activities, such as using the camera, text editor, and Speak. They explored mobility by taking activities outside the classroom. The main goal was to break any initial fear among the teachers, and to make them comfortable with exploring the laptop by themselves. They also used more complex tools such as Scratch, doing basic programming to create short dialogs in a very playful way.

The experience was valuable to the core team, too, for they will be the ones to provide long-term support as the deployment expands to more schools. The OLPC team feels they are gaining broader acceptance from other ministries and organizations. The national coordinator, the primary participants, the core team, and the OLPC team continue to develop a strong collaboration. People are very enthusiastic.

Week of August 4

http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/2008-August/000138.html

Thailand: OLPC held a five-day regional workshop in Bangkok, with more than 50 participants from six countries. The goals of the workshop were to:

gain a deeper and more pragmatic familiarity with the ideas about laptops and learning from both a micro scale (child-level) and macro scale (national level)

form next steps for laptop introduction in participating countries

strengthen network among countries in the region