New images of the Cardal pilot project, one week later

(Translation of: Una semana después - Nuevas imágenes del piloto en Cardal. Thanks to Gustavo Fischer for the translation work)

I was fortunate to visit the “Italy” school at Villa Cardal yesterday, where last week the pilot of the Ceibal project was launched, giving XO laptops to all the children there.

View gallery of pictures and videos.

I could see live the long awaited scenes of classrooms where every child is working with his laptop. There was even a moment where some parents of the 6^th grade students asked to talk with the teacher, and she left the children doing some schoolwork with the computers to take the time needed to talk to the parents. When me and Walter Bender, who was there during a very brief visit to our country a few days ago, entered the classroom, they were all working quietly, although we didn’t take long to change that.

As we could see, the kids have taken tons of photos, played and entered the Internet, finding Youtube especially attractive, which has caused some headaches to the LATU personnel in charge of the bandwidth. The teachers have found some very interesting activities to use the computers, which we will refer to later in some other post.

To our presence was added Pablo Silveira from Channel 10, who did some very nice coverage for news program Subrayado. You can see the video of last week’s coverage made for the project launch here:

I see a school that has changed a lot in its usual routine, and that is facing the challenge with strength. The children accompany the effort with much enthusiasm, so much so that absentee levels have dropped significatively.