OLPC Santa Barbara
About: One Laptop per Child Santa Barbara
One Laptop per Child Santa Barbara is a student initiated organization created at the University of California, Santa Barbara, comprised of students and faculty who actively seek to promote and enhance the mission of One Laptop per Child, both locally and internationally.
Our primary objectives are listed here OLPC Santa Barbara Objectives.
First and foremost, we will be bringing laptops to local Santa Barbara elementary classrooms, which will serve as a place for us to examine the uses of and effectiveness of the XO in a local, US classroom setting. Secondly, these classrooms will be a place for us to pilot, test, and evaluate new software that will be developed by UCSB students. We will be utilizing the talent of students and faculty across the disciplines to design and promote educational software that will enhance the elementary student’s educations through the XO. We will be working with teachers to help develop lesson plans around these software programs and the laptops themselves, which can then can be documented and reproduced in classrooms around the world.
Thirdly, we have and will continue to develop International Partner Schools, through which we will facilitate and foster Peer 2 Peer interactions. We are aiming to bring children around the world together, providing local elementary school students a window in to the lives of there peers across the globe, and giving children across the globe a chance to see inside the lives of our Santa Barbara students. We will be creating an interaction similar to a "pen pal" but utilizing the XO technology and starting a "video pal" program. We will connect these classrooms at the individual level, where students truly have the chance to learn from one another other. This is to be done through teachers creating a curriculum that explores their partner schools geography, lifestyle, weather, farming, ect...
Fourthly, we will promote awareness of the XO and it’s impact on children’s education, and to raise funds to put laptops in the hands of our local Santa Barbara County 3rd grade elementary students as well as students around the world through the give one get one program. We will be giving presentations to high profile individual donors, school boards, and local organizations, in hope of having laptops donated to students in many of the local schools and in the hands of their international partner schools.
We feel this pilot provides all parties involved with a great opportunity for learning, collaboration, and education. UCSB students will be learning to collaborate across disciplines and with both local and international elementary schools to make this project a phenomenal success. Our Santa Barbara Elementary school students will have the opportunity to engage in a new type of collaborative education through the XO’s, with their fellow classmates and with their peers around the world. It will be a window to the world for them and their international counterparts, and a chance to learn and develop through groundbreaking technology and innovation in education.
Current Partners
Technology Management Program, UC Santa Barbara. http://www.tmp.ucsb.edu
University of California Santa Barbara. http://www.ucsb.edu
Kellogg Elementary School, Goleta, CA. http://www.kellogg.goleta.k12.ca.us