Brazil-Rwanda Videoconference Snapshots
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Internship programs: developing local capacity about laptops and learning
Group of Interns that worked as trainers during the July HoS and Teachers Capacity Building
Maybe the most important goal of OLPC in Rwanda is to introduce powerful learning ideas in the society, showing that children are able of much more than school usually offers and computers are a fantastic tool to develop this potential. However, to make such goal sustainable, it is necessary to develop local capacity that really understands the principles behind laptops and learning.
We need to reach people in different levels and spread the ideas not only among school’s teachers, but in people that will support OLPC initiative, people that will be teachers of the teachers, students, school managers, politicians and so on. We need to help the society to change the “grammar of school” speaking a new language that goes beyond teaching, and focus mainly on learning.
As part of this larger perspective, we run different kinds of internship programs in Rwanda. We mostly focus just graduated students (both from universities and secondary schools), but we also have actions on future teachers that are studying in universities and Teachers Training Centers – TTCs.
At the same time that this action is building capacity for people in the country, it is helping to support the activities at schools, contributing in the growth of examples about powerful ways to learn with laptops.
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The Challenges of OLPC Scale Implementation in Rwanda
Juliano Bittencourt, Learning Development Coordinator for OLPC in Rwanda, posted in his personal blog a reflection about the challenges of the OLPC scale implementation in Rwanda. He discuss the strategies the OLPC Learning team is using in the country to achieve scale without totally sacrificing quality. See more at JBittencout’s Blog.
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1st OLPC Head of Schools & Champion Teachers Capacity Building
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.
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Video-conference: Rwandan Kids of Kagugu school met Brazilian Kids
Jun 17 and 18 Rwandan kids of Kagugu Primary School met Brazilian kids through Skype.
Rwandan students said in Portuguese: Bom dia! Oi! Tudo Bem?
Brazilian students said in English: Good afternoon! How are you?
Rwandan students presented themselves in Portuguese: Oi! Meu nome é… Muito prazer!
Brazilian students presented themselves in English: Hi! My name is …. Nice to meet you!
This activity was part of the beginning of a small partnership between Brazilian and Rwandan Students. Read more…
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The Matsiko Project: Curiosity Investigators
By Silvia Kist
During the school holiday in July 2009 in Rwanda, students and teachers from Nonko, Rwamagana and Kagugu Primary Schools returned to their classrooms for a week to participate in Rwanda’s first XO Camp.
The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) Learning Team designed the XO Camp with help from the Rwandan RITC Core Team. The goals of the XO Camp is to give students the opportunity to work on something fun that they would not be able to work on during school and to continue capacity building for teachers. The XO Camp, within the basis of rich learning activity, is designed to provide an example of interesting and challenging things that can be done with laptops and to create a vision of powerful uses of computers for teachers and school managers.
These rich learning activities relate to the growth model that OLPC and the Government of Rwanda are building for the laptop initiative in Rwanda. In this growth model, it is important to create powerful exemplars, which are centers of innovation and reflection about laptops and learning. The enthusiasm and the lessons learned in these centers are used to spread the transformation across the school system (see David Cavallo’s paper, Models of Growth: Towards Fundamental change in learning environments).
We have had 3 XO Camps that ran simultaneously at the primary schools: Matsiko Project, Newspaper and Game Programming. We are spotlighting the Matsiko Project in this entry. The Matsiko Project was created to introduce a different approach of the way the learning happens. The idea behind the Matsiko Project is to offer an opportunity for a group of students to express their curiosities about the world and to conduct investigations about subjects that are meaningful to them.
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During Genocide Remembrance Week
Samuel Dusengiyumva, close friend and colleague, began a blog to tell his story during the conflict in Rwanda. Samuel is heroic in his actions and a true inspiration to us all.
Please read follow his touching stories in his blog: http://dusengiyumva.wordpress.com
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