OLPC Sri Lanka

2007 status: green
green

News

• Dec 10, 2009 1:00pm - The president of Sri Lanka officially launched the OLPC project in Sri Lanka amidst a gathering of senior government officials, corporate sponsors, MGO heads, members of the university system, open source community and and other diginitaries. Over 400 primary school children and their parents participated in this event where each of them received an XO laptop from the president. The key differentiators between the XO and other laptops were explained by well-known child specialist, Dr Hiranthi Wijemanne, Trustee of the OLPC Lanka Foundation and Dr Ruwan Weerasinghe, faculty head, University of Colombo, Computing Centre. Niel Gunadasa, Director ICT of the Ministry of Education made a video presentation of the Sinhala and Tamil content that was developed jointly with the UCSC and open source community and the president was impressed with the effort to localise the content prior to deployment. Full deployment of the laptops will commence in January 2010, with a comprehensive monitoring process in place to measure key indicators.(Sunil)
• Sept 09, 2009 OLPC Technical Team of the Ministry of Education will have a large workshop at which they will be installing 1300 OLPC's with the Local Language Sinhala and Tamil in Isurupaya. The event will be attended by several persons who are interested in and supporting the OLPC project. The project is being coordinated by the Director of ICT in the Ministry of Education. (Mettavihari)
• Aug 10,11,12,17,18,19,24.25,26 Grade 1 - 5 Teacher training at University of Colombo School of Computing ( UCSC ).
• Jan 07 - 13, 2009 OLPC Technical Team training at University of Colombo School of Computing ( UCSC ).
• Dec 15 - 18, 2008 OLPC Teacher Training at University of Colombo School of Computing ( UCSC ) .
• August 10 - 26, 2009 OLPC Teacher Training at University of Colombo School of Computing ( UCSC ). Teachers from selected schools from all the provinces were taught some concepts behind OLPC and trained to use of the educational tool - OPLC.
• April 05 2009. UCSC NOC developed OLPC updater software in order to deploy in school servers. This updater will be available for anyone to use/contribute in near future.

Even Pictures

OLPC Sri Lanka project pictures

Mailing Lists

• OLPC Sri Lanka News & events - sri-lanka@lists.laptop.org
• OLPC Teachers - olpc-lk-teachers@lists.laptop.org
• OLPC Developers - olpc-lk-dev@lists.laptop.org

Localization

The Sinhala Linux distribution has support for Sinhalese. The Tamil localization work has been done at the UCSC.

Roadmap

• Teacher Training
• Regional Technical Team Training
• xs server setup
• xo Distribution

OLPC and LK.XS Configuration

OLPC XS Configuration
OLPC Configuration

About Sri Lanka

The principal language of Sri Lanka is Sinhala. The Tamil language is prevalent among the minority communities living predominantly in the central, eastern and northern province in Sri Lanka although it is fairly common in other parts of the country as well. English, although not spoken in most instances, is generally understood by a substantial percentage of the general population. Due to the many opportunities available, both locally and overseas, to those who can read and write in English, English education is the most widely sought after along with IT skills training. The demand for both English and IT training is consistent throughout every part of the country.

OLPC in Sri Lanka

OLPC Lanka Foundation is currently working with the Ministry of Education and the World Bank in deploying 1000 XO laptops to 9 schools in the nine provinces of Sri Lanka. In keeping with the OLPC concept of saturating the regions, private sector funding to import an increased number of XO laptops has been secured for an additional 350 units for piloting in schools around the primary pilots. This roll out is targeted to be completed by end September 2009. The pilots would be closely monitored by both MoE and World Bank officials. The official launch of the project is scheduled for December 10, 2009.

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Primary Language	,|x|Language spoken::x}}
Number of Laptops	Number of manufactured laptops::1350
Keyboard Layout	Keyboard::
Build	,|x|Software release::x}}
Date(s) Arrived in Country	,|x|Has received laptops on date::x}}
School Server	,|x|School server status::x}}
Deployment Status	Deployment status::With World Bank and OLPC Lanka Foundation support.

Researches on OLPC Enabled Education in Sri Lanka

The pilot project is being implemented by the ministry of education, Sri Lanka. Changes or social, padagogical or technological changes in ICT enabled childhood education is being carefully experimented in in Sri Lankan context.A paper was presented in eAsia 2009 Conference on Pedagogy Changes for ICT Enabled Primary Education in Sri Lanka. And a research is ongoing at one of the schools, Blackwood School, Haputhale that have been distributed OLPC under the pilot project.