Educators

Welcome

This page is intended to become an overview of OLPC educational activities and community.

While much of our effort over the last few years has been devoted to bringing the physical laptop into existence, that laptop is simply the carefully crafted means to an end. OLPC is an education project, not a laptop one. The laptop's novel characteristics, our unusual focus, and the project's extraordinary scale (tens and hundreds of millions of children, not "a few hundred here, a few thousand there"), all have the goal of a rapid and profound impact on the education of the world's children. We invite you to be a part of it.

There are currently a couple of hundred laptops, of various versions, at pilot sites around the world. Mostly for testing of hardware and basic concepts, as their software is still rudimentary. This summer, the final hardware pre-production "B4" beta-test will go out to another thousand or so children. Then the first production run will be a few million, and increase from there. Content releases are just beginning.

Could someone double-check my numbers? tnx MitchellNCharity 13:19, 23 June 2007 (EDT)

Some quick highlights

• laptop.org/children/learning
• OLPC Nigeria/Galadima
• OLPC Thailand/Ban Samkha/trial-200705

what else? MitchellNCharity 13:19, 23 June 2007 (EDT)

Introduction

• Learning Vision
• Educational content ideas

We need a big-picture paragraph describing:

• where is potential content discussed
• who creates content
• how it gets collected an curated
• how it gets distributed
• and how people can contribute to these steps

MitchellNCharity 13:19, 23 June 2007 (EDT)

Contributing

Jump right in!

Never used a wiki before? Wikipedia has a tutorial.

• List of some education-related tasks

Projects

• Synthesizing info from pilot programs
• Expand presence of educators on wiki
• Educational bundle as part of each release
• Reactivate educators mailing list
• Educational activity guidelines
• Educator Jam
• Meta-indexing for library
• Towards Collaborative Constructionism
• Educational toolkit
• Content guidelines

Project Ideas

Activating educators is a brainstorming space for organizational principles and new project ideas.

Guidelines and Tutorials

• Educational activity guidelines
• Collaboration guidelines

We need more tutorials!

Frequently Asked Questions

Ask a question and someone will try to answer it.

Comments and Discussion

Please leave comments on the Educators talk page.

Community

The purpose of this community is to support teachers who are using XOs in their classrooms, and to involve educators of various backgrounds who are interested in contributing to the OLPC project.

Haven't been here before?

• Create an account on the OLPCWiki!
• Add yourself to the educator Roll Call page.
• New to wiki editing? Here's a good tutorial to help you get started.

What should I do first?

• Read about the OLPC Learning Vision, to learn more about why we think children in developing countries need laptops and what we think laptops will enable them to do.
• Learn about our pilot programs-- read our reports from Nigeria and Thailand, visit the OLPC Ceibal blog, and explore the wiki pages created by OLPC Brazil.
• Familiarize yourself with OLPC's vision for content and collaboration, and the various Creative Commons licenses, since we want educational material produced for / connected with the project to be free and open source.
• Read some of the comments from teachers and children involved in the project.

And then what?

Join the community

• Add an educator user box to your user page.
• Create an educational organization page for your organization, group, or school.
• Start to Participate.

Contribute content

• Read about the content repository that will reside on the school servers.
• Add to the list of ideas for content that should be included in the repository.
• Contribute your content directly to OLPC by following these instructions.

Create activities

• Read the educational activity guidelines to learn about the features of the XO that pertain directly to educators.
• Contribute to our collection of story-based learning activities.
• Create a new activity, either with an activity template or entirely from scratch.