This Monday, July 5th, started a one week Capacity Building about the XO laptop with 300 teachers from all 30 Districts  (5 Provinces) of Rwanda. This is the start of the second milestone of the OLPC project implementation in the country. The first one was the distribution of 10.000 XOs that OLPC donated to Rwanda in 2008, most of them inside Kigali. This second phase is the distribution of 100.000 XOs bough by the Rwanda Government into 150 school all across the country up the December 2010.

The training is being attended by  the Head of School and one teacher from each one of those 150 schools. Its main objective is to discuss with the schools representatives the implementation plan for the project and gather their input. During the training, school are going to be informed by the Ministry of Education details about issues like electrification of classrooms, laptops distribution, implementation schedule, creating awareness with parents and local communities, etc.

They also are going to learn about the two main points of the OLPC implementation: one laptop per each child and children take laptops home. Those two points are always controversial and it is very important that school’s principals understand the underlining logic behind them. It the school management buy the concept, the success chances of the project in the school increase significantly.

Although the training has its main objective into the awareness of the school and logistics, 2 of the 5 days are going to be dedicated to teachers getting familiar with the XO laptop and its usage. For this purpose, the Center for Laptops and Learning and its interns created a small reference booklet that covers most of the training content. You can check the booklet here: OLPC_Rwanda Training booklet.

During the training, we also are going to implement simultaneous dramaturgy technics in order to foster the discussion among teachers of common challenges a classroom with laptops faces.

You can take a look in the development of the training through our Flickr Photostream were we will post daily the pictures of the training.

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