User:Dagista

Dalarna University & Royal Institute of Technology_Sweden

Universities: Dalarna University & KTH, Sweden
Team Name: OLPCorps_Ethio_Swed
Team Memembers: Dagmawi S. Tesfa, Demerew K. Tesfaye
Deployment country: Ethiopia

Proposal
What are the key elements for success? Learning environments are transformed:

   * Educators involved in laptop programs … promote collaborative learning and … provide individualized instruction;
         o students and teachers move around more. Instead of staying put to do “seat work”, students gather to work on projects;
         o (this) frees teachers to roam about the room helping those who have problems or need remediation;
         o learning in laptop classrooms is often more self-directed. 

Assessment techniques change:

   * Teachers in laptop classrooms are more willing to assign presentations and multimedia projects to students, and score them using customized, project-driven rubrics and even self-assessments. 

Students are highly engaged: Like teachers, students also show improved technology skills and sophistication. Productivity increase: Students develop better organizational skills because they are needed to keep track of what's on their computer and to accomplish complex project work in a timely manner. Attitudes toward writing improve:

   * 76% of students said they enjoy writing more on the laptops than on paper;
   * 80% indicated laptops make it easier to rewrite and revise their writing;
   * 73% said they earn better grades for laptop work; 

The data demonstrate shifts in not only students' writing attitudes, but also in their practices. These are changes we've also observed in language arts teachers' writing instruction strategies, and in the attitudes and practices of other content area teachers.

How can we best prepare our teachers to make the most use of this initiative? Connected laptops enable new approaches to teacher preparation beyond standardized, centralized, hierarchical approaches. We can create pockets of excellence, connected communities of practice, strong exemplars of powerful learning activities, new content, and mechanisms for the spread of ideas. A significant impact of OLPC will be the degree to which connectivity affords support to the teachers. Typical “training” efforts have been limited by the amount of time and the degree of access to the teachers in order to support their ongoing development. Because OLPC ensures that teachers will have their own laptops and high-bandwidth connectivity, we have a means of supporting them that previously did not exist. Teachers, parents, and concerned experts can join in to create new learning networks to improve educational thinking and practices.

We certainly don't need to train children how to use the laptop. Likewise, approaches that infantilize teachers, or do not respect them or believe in their capabilities, or only focus on teaching IT skills and office tools, have proven to have limited impact on education despite the investment of millions of dollars. The point is not to have teachers re-create the same lessons in PowerPoint. The point is to help them learn using technology and reflect on this learning. We need to engage them in those learning methodologies that are enhanced by connected laptops: the design and construction of personally meaningful objects using a variety of computational and traditional materials—a more diversified, humanistic, holistic approach to learning than previously was logistically possible. This process is ultimately liberating. when children bring the laptops home with them, many parents began adult education courses at night using the laptops. Many families chose to move into communities with laptop programs. Children develop the skills to do normal maintenance on their laptops. Most important, though, is that the children engage more deeply in learning and school work over the year; the computer helps deepen this interaction.

The typical measures of test scores and years in school are important, but miss the key points that make quality education critical for human and social development. A child who learns to read but hates it so much that he refuses to read may test well, but is really an example of educational system failure. A child who does not learn to think, imagine, and create with or without new technology will have difficulty with full social and economic inclusion in the modern world

About us

The team consists of two members.The first one is Dagmawi, who is currently working on his master’s thesis project in Product and Production development. He posses a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering and two Master's Degree the first one in Industrial engineering and the second in mechanical Engineering-Product & production development which is in progress. he has also awarded certificates on Quality management system development & implementation based on ISO 9001:2000, Integrated performance management, computer maintenace and Networking and Total quality management. Furthermore, his four years of past practical experience while he was in his home country(Ethiopia) at Ministry of Agricultural and Rural development as well as in ministry of Defence in the development of Information and communication technology in developing country will help him to implement the vision of one laptop per child project. Working towards our OLPCorps proposal, Dagmawi is the coordinator of the team and he is responsible for activities related of project leader.

The second member of the team is Demerew k. Tesfaye, is currently doing his master’s thesis on distributed real-time network management. Furthermore he has a double masters degree, the first one is in computer science and the second one is in Network services and systems-which is in progress. He has also taken Short term IT trainings and certifications on CCNA1, CCNA2, CCNA3, CCNA4 and CCNP1, Oracle10g Database Administration, UNIX operating system, As/400 iseries Concepts and Facilities. He has five(5) years of experience on different position at Ethiopia Electric Power Corporation and other institutions as programmer and Database Administrator with a strong knowledge of software development with C++, RPG/400 and Java programming languages.