OLPC India/Nashik
Holy Mother School
Holy Mother School is an English medium school in Nashik, Maharashtra. We are a private school established in 2004 by Joshua and Heera Pritikin. My wife runs the school, and I funded it out of my own savings. It is breaking even this year.
A small OLPC trial has begun as of July 2008. We are working on an Internet connection. We already have a machine to serve as a school server.
We would love to make the laptops child owned but
- There are 50 students in 1st grade and older.
- Students pay about 105 USD per year in tuition.
I am paying for 10 laptops to develop interest.
Our implementation is simplistic because we are not yet trying to achieve child ownership. The laptops are owned by the school. The children spend just a few hours a week working with them. As the kids and parents become more comfortable with the laptops, we expect to move towards child ownership and closer integration into the curriculum.
We hope to save ourselves from disappointment by starting with very low expectations.
The teachers like the laptops so much that we decided to order another 5 for a total of 15.
What we really need for child ownership is to replace the cost of books with the cost of the laptop. Children spend about 25 USD per year on books. That's about 125 USD over 5 years. There are a bunch of things we need before this is possible:
- NCERT books are a good start, but they are just scans of the pages. We need books or activities better tailored to the laptop medium.
- An English slice of Wikipedia would be neat. [DONE]
- Everybody is impressed by the speak activity. English, Hindi, or Marathi childrens' books which are integrated with text-to-speech would be fantastic, even if pronunciation is poor. I know people are working on this, but we need it ASAP.
Update 08 Mar 2009
Since we can't afford one laptop per child, we are planning to buy 1 USB key per student. The students will own the USB keys.
Please Give Many
Child ownership is crucial, and we need your help to get there. A single gift of 100 laptops would permit us to move to child ownership with a laptop-saturated learning environment.
Children and staff
Cultural program within one of the classrooms
Traditional Indian dance
The first day with laptops
10 laptops are not enough
Unpacking
Unpacking
Playing
Teachers and students
