One Laptop Per Child!
I remember reading about the One Laptop Per Child program over a year ago. The mission of this program is to design a $100 laptop – a technology which could revolutionize how we educate the worlds children. I thought this sounded great but I was not sure how it would actually work.
The idea behind the program is that we could have an educational revolution in third world countries if every child was provided with a laptop. Companies began working on developing such a laptop which could be made at a low cost so that such a program would be achieveable. The fundamental theory behind this program in relation to e-learning is that technology enables children to learn so much.
There are so many articles and websites dedicated to this program that I found it difficult to choose 1 for this blog. Here are two websites that you may be interested in looking at: www.laptop.org and www.olpc.com . I decided to choose a YouTube Video which I believe summaries this program well:
A teacher in one third world country talks about the amazing benefits of these laptops, saying that these laptops have encouraged and motivated the children to learn. Their classroom environment is so different as children have access to knowledge that they never had before. They now also have a resource to create, play and learn on.
The program has taken so many things into consideration when designing these laptops (and they are still improving them). They want to ensure the laptops are both highly functionable and fun. They have to be robust, durable and compact. The laptop is charged by solar energy and does not consume much energy. Another very important feature of this laptop is that they are networkable – enabling children to work together on their laptops without the need for wires or the internet.
I love the idea of this program, especially as it is a not-for-profit organisation that is in control. Their aim is inline with the United Nations Nineth Millenium Goal: “to ensure that every child between the ages of 6 and 12 has immediate access to a personal laptop by 2015″. The laptops are purchased by companies and ordinary people who donate money towards this program. The way in which people are getting involved, to me, proves that people value education and acknowledge how important technology is to education.
I would love to see this attitude towards technology and learning adapted by Australian schools. If we valued technology for education in the same way then perhaps Australian schools would also provide one laptop per child.
Images made available under Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution Licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ Available here and here.
