[OLPC India] visit

[freeman murray]

Hi Everyone,

Thanks so much for the trip out to the Khairat school.
I'd love to explore more ways of getting involved.
I wrote this and posted some of my pics on my blog
http://wheresfreeman.blogspot.com

cheers,

Freeman


Tuesday the friendly folk at Reliance took a small group of us out to
Khairat to visit the OLPC pilot school in India. The school has one
room, one teacher and the kids are in 1st - 4th grades.

When we first arrived the teacher was giving a lecture on something in
Marathi at the black board. Several laptops were in a corner being
charged, most were lying on the floor with the kids, a couple were
open.

Amit one of the Reliance people clearly knew the teacher and the
children well, so when he entered the kids all opened their laptops
and started eagerly showing all of us the different things they could
do with their computers.

The laptops were passed out in early October of last year. By now
everyone was very comphortable with them. They could navigate menus,
understood how to click on icons, could click and drag objects across
the screen, etc.

At least in the eagerness surrounding showing off their knowledge to
the friendly outsiders who came in, their principal purpose in pushing
buttons, clicking and dragging seemed to be to make the device do
something ie. make noise or do some animation. Towards this end the
kids could explore the menu system to great depth, but without any
english comprehension of the meaning of the text I don't think they
'understood' the conceptual layout of the system very deeply.

They did understand the top level of icons and which ones would bring
up interesting applications.

The laptops were in remarkably good condition. I saw that one key 'i'
had ripped off one of the laptops, but that was the only problem I
saw, and you could still get the 'i' to type by touching your finger
to the contact points.

I don't know what the problem was, but the school server was not operational.

The couple hours there were wonderful. The kids are super enthusiastic
and there is a feeling that 'something special' is happening. The
teacher was also very nice and encouraging.

While everyone is very excited, its not immediately obvious how to use
the laptops to better teach the curriculum educators are accustomed
to. I see a need for someone technical to spend time working with the
children and the laptops to pioneer ways of actively using them to
facilitate learning beyond the conventional methods.

Maybe me :)