Deployment Success Stories

Each member of the panel gave a brief introduction and summary of projects they worked on in terms of challenges faced and how to create success.

1. Claudia Urrea
   1. Critical Success Factors for OLPC deployments
      1. Ownership of the machine
      2. The computer going home travels with new ways of learning
      3. Students spend time in exploring and appropriating the XO
         1. The teacher should be focussed on education rather than teaching the kid the technology, which the kid can pick up very well on their own
      4. Deployments should involve everyone at all levels
         1. Parents
         2. Academia
         3. Public sector
         4. Private sector
         5. Teachers
         6. Education department
         7. Government
         8. Volunteers
         9. OLPC, including how OLPC interacts with the other stakeholders, volunteers and participants
      5. Scale – engage at scale in all areas
   2. Stories
      1. They just finished handing laptops to all kids in Lareoha, Argentina
      2. They are already thinking about changing the way education works and teachers are trained
      3. Teachers are seeing the value of the XO and are asking for more training
2. Tim Falconer
   1. Background
      1. Waveplace have done 18 pilots in the last 5 years; this has not all been success; this has required persistence
      2. Goals
         1. Model pilots
         2. Confident mentors
         3. Transformed children
         4. Courseware ecosystem
   2. Success
      1. It’s all in the details; in helping people stay motivated; overcoming the challenges and breaking through to the good feelings that make it sustainable
      2. Children with a sense of achievement
3. Daniel Drake
   1. Involved in large deployments around the world including Africa, Asia and a large amount of time in Latin America
   2. Challenges
      1. Internationalisation, especially in countries with a large number of languages such as Ethiopia. Some countries have no official keyboard layout for the language.
      2. Charging the laptop is difficult given the small number of locations where there is sufficient power. For example, 2 power outlets with many power strips daisy chained to charge 35 laptops. The children are eagerly waiting in their class waiting for the teacher to bring the next laptop that has finished charging to the door,.... which they recognise as theirs by the colour of the OLPC icon on the case. Many countries are coming up with charging solutions to rack laptops and charge and move them around easily.
      3. Wireless access points. Best strategy is one access point per classroom. Often they need cages around them and high wall mountings to avoid vandalism
      4. School servers have been stored in padlocked metal cages to protect them from vandalism or theft.
      5. You need full time people working for the project locally. The core team for Paraguay was ten people, nine of which were from Paraguay. These tend to be young energetic people who push the norms.
4. Pablo Flores
   1. This is an independent community that is discussing how to build independent education and a new future. It is very important that people from all backgrounds are discussing these kind of things. This is a very grown up way of working and is a success factor we should be working on.
   2. RAP Ceibal started in early 2008, originally a network of people connected through a mailing list trying to help with giving laptops from logistics of opening boxes to helping the teachers with the laptops. More and more this group started to work with the families as well as the children and teachers.
      1. They found that where there was not enough work with the families, the breakage rate of the computers gets higher.
      2. The network now has around 2000 volunteers for helping with giving laptops and flashing the computers. In a single day they managed to re-flash 40,000 computers.
      3. “RAP Plazes” were sessions working in the park with children, parents and the community
      4. “RAP SMS” is now available where teachers can text support questions and they get an answer from volunteers who also maintain a database of common questions and answers
      5. Project from UDELAR (University); 40 university teachers and 500 university students
         1. Working on training, with families, and teachers, including social awareness. Often working in small groups of ten people, with up to 40 or 50 groups operating around area.
         2. Researching various areas including technology and networking; how to solve the local problems they are facing
5. Sameer Verma
   1. Professor at the business school at SF State University
   2. OLPC SanFrancisco has 160 people on the mailing list with monthly meetings of between 3 and 85 people over the past three years.
      1. 12 projects running in the SF Bay area
      2. 15 laptops in Madagascre
      3. Several projects in India including a deployment of 40 and another with 25
      4. 115 XOs just cleared customs in Jamaica
   3. Jamaica case study
      1. Broke the project down into key areas and ensured there were people skilled in each on the team.
         1. Education
         2. Technology
         3. Social outreach
      2. Didn’t get much traction at the ministry, but had research interest to collect data and write about it, involvement from local volunteer team, and a school that wanted to deploy the laptops.
      3. They paired up with a teacher training college in Jamaica. They build lesson plans every day as part of their job – now they build lesson plans around Sugar for sharing with the school to help integrate use of the XOs and XSs in the teaching of children. They plan to use a dozen or so sugar activities paired with lesson plans. In addition they are keeping the parents and the education authority informed and in the loop, the idea being that this will become a pilot that will enable a bigger deployment to get off the ground, using this initial project as a hub for reaching out to other schools.