Hello everyone, You may be interested in a review I have written of the OLPC Australia education programme:
http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2012/02/01/creating-an-education-programme/ It contains the video of a talk I gave at the linux.conf.au conference in January, and a more detailed explanation of that talk. Some of the key points: * We have a comprehensive education programme that highly values teacher empowerment and community engagement, with a focus on building sustainability. * The investment to provide a connected learning device to every one of the 300 000 children in remote Australia is less than 0.1% of the annual education and connectivity budgets. * For low socio-economic status schools, the cost is only $80 AUD per child. * Our programme is available to any school in Australia, for $380 AUD per child. * Our programme is schools-centric, with a strong focus on the teacher. * A teacher must undergo training and earn a certification to qualify to receive XOs for their class. * Training is conducted online, and hence scales very well. * We have an online community to provide peer-driven support, assisted by OLPC Australia personnel. * Technology development and deployment is guided by the principle that it must be manageable by non-technical personnel. * Our technology platform is open and not locked-down, providing maximum opportunity for children to learn and empowering schools/communities to own the deployment for themselves. * We are seeing real educational results from our efforts, and are engaged in longitudinal and detailed evaluation. * Our supporters include corporations and members of parliament at state and federal levels, but we can always use more help :) Please have a read if you are interested, and contact us if you would like to take part in our mission. We will be releasing more information on this educational programme in the coming months. Sridhar Sridhar Dhanapalan Engineering Manager One Laptop per Child Australia _______________________________________________ Grassroots mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/grassroots
