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Blogging Since Infancy: Transforming Uruguay

Categories: Feature, OLPC Uruguay

Ever since the Uruguay government had started to implement the Ceibal project, with the goal of providing one free XO laptop to every public school student, a transformation has began.

Ceibal Florida Blog reports [1]:

[2]“The delivery of a laptop to every child in our public schools generated profound changes. For example the sidewalk of the school ceased to be an empty space to become the ‘path of communication’. Today if we go through the various schools will see that this space is a rallying point (of XO laptop toting kids), in any time of the day.”

[3]

Here are [4] some more great pictures of Uruguayan kids with XO laptops in poor neighborhoods.

And look what great contents these kids are developing!

The children of class four at School No. 37 “Canada” (4º Año A de la Escuela Nº 37 “Canadá) are using their XO laptops to tell the world via blog [5] that:

“The educational value of art is unique and its realization in the school is given because the instrument is the same person, appreciating or producing artistic works that arouse their emotions, their feelings, their thoughts, allowing an exploration of themselves and the group.” (machine translation [6])

The children of class Six at School No. 37 “Canada” (Sextos años de la Escuela 37 “Canadá”) portrays their exhibition of work with recycled materials in their blog [7]:

A few days ago we did an exhibition of work done with unused material, recycling. The proposal was to do a story with an imaginary character and then build the character with scrap materials.

The difference of OLPC and eToys for children are explained by Ceibal Florida Blog [8]:

Students produce materials in the docs and share with other colleagues and download. In this way they can guide their presentations and work collaboratively. This advantage not found in ETOYS. It is also possible to embed into the blog. An example of these activities can be viewed at the following blog [9].

Ceibal Jam

In our previous feature [10] we reported that the Plan Ceibal project (OLPC in Uruguay) organized a programming “jam” in order to induce local programmers to develop innovative applications of the OLPC laptops which had already reached the hundreds of thousands of Uruguayan students. Because the laptops currently miss many applications to help students learn and participate in the classroom.

On 30th of August and 6th of September, two consecutive Saturdays the 2nd Ceibal Jam [11] was held in Uruguay Catholic University. It continued to strengthen a community of technicians and educators who want to learn more about the technologies used in the Plan Ceibal proposing new developments.

Here is a report on the Jam [12]:

One of the things that drew the most attention is the variety of backgrounds and levels of knowledge that were accumulated in these two Saturdays: computer, teachers, researchers, architects and graphic designers amongst others, some experts in programming, others who are stirred and others simply wanted to learn.

Ceibal Plan's
Blogging since infancy
project will organize two citizen media training workshops for the children in the coming months.