Yesterday we were in Sarandí Grande for the announced support session for parents and teachers that have received their laptops recently.
In the evening we received the parents, some of who brought their kids along. We started by introducing the project and giving some presentations on the theoretical use of the laptops. It was very interesting to see the parents listening attentively and the kids concentrating on tasks in the laptop. We then opened up for questions. It was amazing to see how some kids (like Valentina in the picture) have learned to use their laptops so quickly and how they put it in good use.Image 1: It was on our way out of the school, the bus driver hurrying the group of '83 volunteers so we could leave. Someone brought hot water to replenish the thermoses [to drink mate]. We were happy, talking about the gratifying moments we had experienced since morning. As we turn out of the driveway, we see a family sitting on the porche of their simple block house. The father was sitting on a low stool, his wife standing on his side, three children gathered around them, one of them still with their tunic. They watched with joy how their father explored the XO, one of the kids was thrilled to explain the basics. We weren't able to take a picture, but this memory will stay with us for ever.
Image 2: We were giving the first XOs to the kids in the school for disabilities. One of the volunteers stuck the labels and scanned the laptops; we called out the kids one by one to receive their laptop. We called for 'Juan'; the principal, with a big smile, said to us: "you'll see". From behind a steel column, in the roofed patio of the old house, emerged a little kid with big cheeks and glasses, tumbling around with a great big smile. Juan has Down's Syndrome. He's happy and you see it. Everybody can tell. He received his laptop and quickly and happily tumbled back to his place. Everybody cheered. It was a party!
Episode 04 takes us on location in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Where the first batches of XOs have been delivered and deployed. Meet the teachers using the laptops in the classroom. Where besides doing daily assignments on the machines, some students have already learned programing. Local culture has permeated the project, and as a veteran school principal explains, an improved education is set to equip a new generation of Brazilian citizens.
"This is the story of the little green laptop that could. Meet the faces behind the One Laptop per Child initiative and see what they do every day in the Cambridge, MA office. Sit in on a brainstorming session. And find out what you can do to help."
The university will support Project Ceibal, accompanying and contributing, with the end of improving opportunity and equality in the access to the new technologies to all children in the country; generating a profound change in education.
It is expected that students and staff of the university will participate, contributing their experience to facilitate the students, teachers and parents first encounter with this new tool (the laptop).
By means of an activity of mass participation throughout the university, it is expected to contribute essential elements to the formation of the university's students. Key elements include: closer contact with the reality of the country, development of communication and expression skills, and the horizontal link with students and staff of other faculties or mayors.
We hope to generate links that will potentially give birth to projects of development, content or that will contribute national know-how. It is expected from this experience, that some students will maintain contact with the schools that they visited and that development projects with social utility will surface.
We aspire for a project of mass participation by students and staff of a variety of carriers, which will develop throughout the year 2008 in which Project Ceibal will spread throughout all rural areas of the country.
Based on a question in an earlier post, I'm making some comments on the project's influence on students' motivation.
Motivation is hard to measure quantitatively. According to the headmaster at the Cardal school, there was never any problem with desertion or any high level of absenteeism, but the latter was reduced this year (i.e., the kids were absent less than in other years). The teachers also tell us that students seem more motivated and that, in particular, they enjoy it when it's time to work with laptops.
On the other hand, additional motivation comes up when the kids take their computers home and show their parents what they have done and what they have created. In this sense, there's generalized perception that the project is helping to bring families "closer" to the school. Edith Moraes, director of the grade school, says that she's very happy that a long-existing trend is reversing itself - where it seemed that the school was going down one path and families down another.
In any case, these results are extremely preliminary given that the Cardal experience has special qualities due to it's enormous level of exposure.
We could have a new reference point in the next few days, when massive laptop distribution begins in other schools in Florida.
A second regional project analysis meeting under the heading of "One Computer Per Child and Per Teacher" will be held on October 16-18, 2007 at Montevideo's Hotel Cottage.
Representatives are expected from Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Panama, and Peru, in addition to Uruguay (download Agenda (pdf in Spanish).
This meeting is strongly supported by the IDRC and its "IT and Communications Technology for Development in the Americas (ICT4D Americas)" program.
Negroponte says if Uruguay places an order for XO laptops, the project is ready to deliver. "Some machines would arrive as early as December 1," he says. Complete order fulfillment depends on a number of factors. "The exact rollout of laptops ... is driven as much by other orders and the need to keep overall manufacturing smooth -- flat or upward sloping -- not with peaks and troughs, to drive the price lower and lower."Read the complete article.
According to Pablo Flores, a team member with the Ceibal Project, the organization overseeing the implementation of laptops in Uruguay's classrooms, there is a "logistics plan to distribute the laptops school by school" once delivery is taken. Flores says the Ceibal Project team is already preparing schools for the influx of laptops. "We are working very hard to integrate the computers into the educational system. We are training teachers and working in a collaborative environment to join together the contents and applications chosen by educators, as well as sharing educational experiences."
Translated by Alec McLure
"Commision's Report leans towards US$199 laptop"
ALEJANDRO NOGUEIRA
The formal decision is not out yet, but Latu received the report from the committee adjudicating on the bid for 100,000 laptops for schools. Nicholas Negroponte's OX scored 56.84 points and the Intel Classmate 53.06.
Yesterday Latu looked at the two companies participating in one of the largest purchases envisioned by the State for one of this administrations' most ambitious educational plans. In addition to the original 100,000 computers in the bid, there's an option for another 50,000 and for hundreds of servers (which are in a separate call for bids).
Brightstar Uruguay presented the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, which has the units designed by Negroponte's MIT group; Grupo Positive de Brasil were there with the Intel machines. Both of these units are made in China under their designer's specifications.
Timeline. The companies now have five days to present any objections to the process - this would delay any decisions by the government, which would rather get the decision made. the official intent is to begin distributing school laptops before the end of the yeard and to roll out to all schools in the country before the end of the current administration.
Brighstar began the process by offering their computer at US$205; Positivo at US$ 274 (in their open-source Linux offering) although this unit had more memory and functionality. Latu negotiated on price, and finally the OX went down to US$199 and Intel's unit to US$258.
Grupo Positivo's proposal, which included servers, connectivity, teacher training and educational portals, also had a proposal for use of Windows and tech support in Uruguay by the Sonda company.
Brightstar's offer only includes teacher training and tech support, in addition to an additional 1% supply of machines for replacement purposes due to wear and tear. In addition, this design allows for parts that can be replaced by the children themselves.
Both machines were additionally designed to be highly impact-, water-, and dust-resistant.
Negroponte's so called "green machine" (it's apple-green) doesn't have a hard disk and uses so called open-source (non-commercial) software. This machines book-sized prototype which weighs in at 1.5 kilos (3.3 lbs) was presented at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis at the end of 2005.
These laptops are the ones being used in a pilot program to bridge the digital gap which is being carried out in the Cardal school in the Flores department [in Uruguay]. [Translator's note - see editor's comment below - it's actually "Florida" department]
Negroponte originally announced a US$100 laptop but up to now hasn't achieved that price. His plan, which originally was focused on working with large populations in poor countries, will apparently have it's first concrete expression in Uruguay.
Uruguay's inclusion in this program was obtained after convincing him that it was easier to apply the project in a small country with a relatively sparse population.
Leader in Cell-Phone Logistics
Brightstar is the Motorola cell-phone distributor used by countries such as Movistar (Telefónica) and CTI Móvil (América Móvil), both in Uruguay and in other countries in Latin America. In Uruguay, it also distributes BlackBerries and Palm [Pilots] and LG-branded products. In the Ceibal Plan bid it offered the Intel-designed computers.
Brighstar Corporation is principally a distributor and provider for value-added services for the wireless telecommunication industry. It specializes in managing inventory, logistics, fulfillment, internet-based solutions, invidual packaging and post-sale support to the cell-phone industry. World-wide, it's the third-largest provider of this type of service. The company was founded in 1997 and now takes in about US$ 4 billion annually.
In July, Intel and OLPC announced a joint agreement to take the benefits of technology to countries in development by using the synergy between their programs. Intel joined the OLPC board in which several IT big-rollers participate. Among them are Google, AMD, Red Hat, News Corporation, and Bright Star itself.
Source: Diario El País
Editor's Note:
| School's blog | Photos | Show |
4th form's blog | Photos | Show |
| 5th form's blog | Photos | Show |
| 6th form's blog | Photos | Show |
In the last few weeks I've been visiting Villa Cardal on a regular basis to provide support to school teachers (see pictures of a recent visit, here are some others taken by Fernando Cormenzana). The goal is to help them do new tasks with the laptops - tasks that sometimes require either some technical knowledge or English-language skills. English is still the main language both on the internet and on XO (just look at eToys).
The announcement of the agreement reached by OLPC and Intel gives rise to much speculation as to how the OLPC project will continue and how it will impact Uruguay and other countries joining this initiative.
, helping reach the world's children. Collaboration with Intel means that the maximum number of laptops will reach children," said Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop per Child.
"Joining OLPC is a further example of our commitment to education over the last 20 years and our belief in the role of technology in bringing the opportunities of the 21st century to children around the world," said Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel.
AMD chip must be quite affected by this alliance. One speculation is that XO's first generation (planned to be available in the next few months) will have AMD's processor and that maybe the second generation (planned for production in 2008 and commercialization in 2009) will have some kind of Intel chip.(Translated by Alec McLure from Comentarios acerca del llamado a licitación 7/07/2007, published by Pablo Flores)
In a previous post I did some initial commentary on the bidding process for Phase I of the Ceibal Project. I'm going to provide a more detailed summary here, now that I've had the chance to read the bidding document in more detail.
First of all, one notices the enormous amount of work involved in considering a project of such complexity. This results in requiring projects proposals with a very wide scope. In this post, I'm only going to mention a few of the points that seem to me to embody the spirit of the call to bids, which doesn't mean that I'm not leaving many important aspects out.
Ceibal Project's Objectives
First, the bid document makes all the project's expected results very clear:
The next objective of the project is to expand to all of the department of Florida. This means giving computers to all its kids and teachers, as well as providing connectivity infrastructure in all its schools and in as many homes as possible.(Translated from Reunión con padres en Villa Cardal, published by Pablo Flores on 6/03/07)
Last Friday we had a meeting at Villa Cardal with the parents and teachers of the kids that attend the school. Several of the project collaborators gathered in a classroom to inform advances in the project, but mostly to listen to opinions, comments, criticism... to have some feedback on how this community is experiencing the arrival of the laptops. From this meeting I compiled several phrases that I want to make public in this blog.
The parents
The meeting congregated a lot of parents, we didn't count them but I estimate they were over one hundred. The great majority of them didn't have a computer at home.
Some of the most touching phrases that were heard:
As I commented in a previous post, Vinod Sreeharsha is an independent journalist who was in Villa Cardal making a coverage during the launching of the pilot project. Here is the complete article he wrote - which has additional information to the one published in the Miami Herald.
In the map, points indicate places from where there were more than 30 accesses.
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 6th 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.
Este es el último post en español en este blog. A partir de este momento el blog en español será http://proyecto-ceibal.blogspot.com, quedando este blog únicamente para entradas en inglés. Recomiendo ver la bienvenida al nuevo blog.
"Los 160 niños que integran el piloto están aprendiendo a usar los ordenadores. Ya los usan para estudiar, pero también los integran en su vida extra curricular. Los maestros también se ponen a tono y los padres se muestran conformes".
Las computadoras portátiles, sin embargo, ya comenzaron a transformar el aula en Villa Cardal. "El poder de esas máquinas es impresionante" señaló el director de la escuela, Marcelo Galain, al destacar que las computadoras tienen una batería con una duración de 12 horas.
El director indicó que los estudiantes recibieron sus computadoras un día antes de un feriado nacional pero que asistieron a clases el día de asueto para comenzar a utilizarlas.
Hubo algunos problemas técnicos de menor cuantía cuando se comenzaron a utilizar las computadoras, y aunque ninguno de los maestros tenía mucha experiencia con ellas, pronto se dieron cuenta que los niños cuyos apellidos llevaban acentos tenían problemas para ingresar al sistema pero el problema fue resuelto con prontitud.
"Las computadoras portátiles se hablan mutuamente de manera automática, tienen un chat de voz, se pueden compartir archivos y todo esto se puede hacer entre las computadoras de este tipo sin necesidad de la Internet", indicó Bender al hablar sobre el diseño. Además, agregó que "si cualquiera de estas computadoras llega a tener acceso a la Internet, todas pueden compartirla".
Galain indicó que ahora observa que los estudiantes están más involucrados en aprender que lo que estaban antes. "Algunos niños a quienes no les gustaba o no querían escribir, ahora se van familiarizando con el procesador de texto", agregó.
Ayer tuve la suerte de visitar la Escuela Italia de Villa Cardal, donde la semana pasada se lanzó el primer piloto del proyecto Ceibal, entregando laptops XO para todos sus niños.
An international meeting took place from April 23 to 27th at OLPC headquarters at MIT, which included direct and indirect participants in the project at a worldwide level. Education authorities, financers and technical staff and most of those linked to OLPC attended a series of
El famoso artículo del New York times... Según la lectura de algunos medios, es la prueba de que dar laptops en las escuelas puede ser un total fracaso. Me refiero a la nota titulada "Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops", que fué publicada por el New York Times el pasado 4 de Mayo. Parte de la información de esa nota fué tomada por el semanario Búsqueda en su edición del 10 de Mayo, donde publica un artículo muy crítico que compara la experiencia norteamericana con lo que ese mismo día estaba comenzando en Cardal. Entre otras cosas el artículo de Búsqueda resalta los problemas de rupturas, hackers, pornografía y falta de uso educativo. Lo primero que me llamó la atención fue que no hubiera oído hablar nada de esa experiencia, según tenía entendido, el primer piloto 1-a-1 con niños se realizó en Costa Rica hace algunos años y hay pocas experiencias de este tipo. Mirando el artículo, veo que la "escuela" norteamericana es un secundario. En las fotos se pueden ver sus "niños". También veo que los laptops son tradicionales, no pensados para enfrentarse a la compleja realidad de un entorno de enseñanza.
Esta nota la tomó Emiliano Cotelo en la entrevista realizada a Juan Grompone y Héctor Florit el pasado 11 de Mayo - recomiendo mucho leer la entrevista, tiene pasajes muy interesantes, donde además de hacer referencia a este tema, se habla del proyecto desde el punto de vista educativo y se abordan muchos de los temas de interés general, como los actores involucrados y el futuro del proyecto.