OLPC India/Katha Chronicle

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Katha Chronicle

Motivation

Katha is an organization that connects grassroots work in education in India and since 1990, it has driven its education model on a single powerful idea: Children can bring change that is sustainable and real, which is in strong alignment with the goal of OLPC. Katha runs 71 schools in slum communities with more than 200,000 children. For more information you can refer: http://www.katha.org.

Introduction

XO laptops were deployed at Katha Khazana, one of the school setup by Katha in a slum community at New Delhi. The school is marked by its distinctive atmosphere creating a rich learning experience for students ranging from pre-nursery grade to 12th grade, which was further enriched when OLPC, India distributed XOs to the school children on 21st January. The OLPC Team (Mr. Amit Bhatia and Mr. Ankur Verma) went there, introduced them to OLPC’s XO. The students were quite surprised to see that these green boxes were really laptops! Some of them were considering it to be sort of game/toy or even a lunch box!

Amit Bhatia introducing children to XO

Chidren XOing

They were quite excited to use the laptop for the first time in their lives and as we gave them instructions to operate the XO and open the Record Activity, they were fascinated to take their photographs. We had initially given a small demonstration to a group of teachers there namely – Mrs. Deepti (9871526884), Mr. Rajesh Mishra (9210909618) and Mr. Purshotam, who were also quite excited about the XO and planned ways in which they could utilize it in their curriculum.

School Teacher - Mr. Rajesh Mishra helping out children

School Teacher - Mrs. Deepti guiding children

We demonstrated various other features such as Chat, Record, Measure, Maze, Speak, TamTam, Etoys and other activities. Students, pumped with new ideas, were so fascinated with the experience that when the teachers began collecting back the laptops, they kept on pinging us about when will they get them again. As there are only 30 XOs compared to large number of students, they have scheduled a turn-wise time for each group.

School Teacher - Mr. Rajesh Mishra helping out children

File:E.JPG School Teacher - Mrs. Deepti guiding children

We helped Mr. Rajesh Mishra (IT teacher), who was quite excited and curious to know more about XO, to add Krishna font for typing in Hindi in the Write activity. For this purpose, the instructions given on this link were quite helpful: http://mathcasts.org/mtwiki/XOLaptop/Fonts . On 23rd January, we conducted a video shoot when Mr. Satish Jha came to see the children, who were quite eager to share their experiences with the XO.

Contact Address

The Contact Address of the School is Katha Khazana, Demonstration Block, Bhumiheen Camp, Govindpuri, Kalakaji, New Delhi – 110019.

Acknowledgements

• Thanks to Amit Bhatia and Satish Jha for making this possible.
• Thanks to the teachers of the school for their continuing efforts.

--Ankur Verma 9, April 2009