OLPC laptops saving youth’s lives in Kicukiro

Primary students in Kicukiro schools, using OLPC Laptops to study and aware the community the effects of an emerging drug” Datura Inoxia” locally know as 36 ( trente six) in Kicukiro area.

The whole idea of holding this five days camp came from an observation made by Pauline Nyirahirwa (working on learning side of OLPC project in Ministry of Education of Rwanda). During her time voluntarily working with some students in holidays, helping them to learn more about uses of their laptops, she observed a strange movement of youth in school neighbouring forest( called ETO), and curiously she asked students about what happens in that forest, students told her about drug users taking this forest as their hidden place to practice this risky acts. She was inspired by this to suggest “Drug” as one of the themes for the three OLPC’s students camps were being organised by OLPC project -MINEDUC. Finally a five days Camp Started 16^thApril

with title “ Children’s Voice Against Drugs”involving totally 24 students from two primary schools ; KICUKIRO & Nyanza both neighbouring this forest. This camp helped students to use their XO Laptops to research, gather all information about different types of drugs found and used in this area. Students also had to use the gathered  information to teach other students and community members about impacts of drugs use on health, security and country development in general. Four days, students interviewed ( recording pictures, videos, writing answers using their laptops)  community member, parents and invited police officer. On the last day of the camp during the campaign at school in which students were presenting their findings, a new emerging drug , declared to be famous in youth and most used was 36 ( Trente six, named after  the maximum number of seed you don’t have to exceed as dose taking this drug). This plant is actually a poisonous helicinogen plant scientifically called Datura inoxia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datura_inoxia, which is normally prohibited to be grown, sold, or bought in some countries mostly in Latina America.

Different students publically gave their testimony, how they  came to know about this drug, all memories mostly started last three years ago. Some students admitted to used this plants seeds as drug many times, and now still seeing their friends using it. They described the effect of this drug on their health, as lost of their sensibility, temporal unconsciousness, hallucinations, vomiting, throat pain and headaches. Rutembesa Peter, P5 at Kicukiro primary school said” my brother used it, and many times he felt unconscious, passes his nights in toilets or bushes, he use to come home in the morning acting like crazy, insul

ting people, etc”.

All students confirms a high level of use of this plant seeds by students, street children and community members, mostly Bicycle taxi-men (Abanyonzi), man-power at Kicukiro market (Abakarani), and other people in this neighborhood. From the information gathered by students showed that Datura plants (36) contain dangerous levels of poison and may be fatal if ingested by humans and other animals, including livestock and pets.

Teachers confessed to not knew about this plant, which

Trente six seeds in Rutembesa Peter's hands grasped around the schoo

is robustly growing every where around the school, neither the history of it being used as drug by students. The school authorities are now eager  to conduct more extended awareness activities  using these students work on their laptops  to make sure all students and community members know about the poisonous effects of this plant.

This camp has been a great success. Besides knowledge constructed by these students about drugs, this camp helped students to build some 21^st century skills , like communication skills, creativity through team work, information searching, preparing presentations using Portfolio activity and confidently present their findings to the audience.

Does curriculum play an important role in regulation of quality of education?

I am writing this as reply to the comment made by Dr.Blaise Talla on the post ” Good learning environment for better job creator” in his comment he asked  if I don’t think that we may also face the problem of quality in education if the curriculum keeps changing?

Even though my point was not necessarily to change/keep changing the curriculum rather than change the way we implement it by providing a learning environment spaces/time/tools/opportunity for learners to construct their entrepreneurial knowledge. let try to see, what is the contribution of the curriculum itself in teaching&Learning:
- Curriculum meaning you have to learn this on a given day, example; At the ninth of May in your eighth years. It guides teachers what to teach one after other as well as  to test whether students retained something within the framework of curriculum. Does this really regulate or ensure the student learned ..let say it is! then how do we regulate the quality of learning ? is it by testing  how many right & wrong answers they can give to questions picked from the curriculum? We both know that this method of evaluation doesn’t help in testing some important intends of education like; managerial skills, problem solving, decision making, negotiating skills..etc.
I think the curriculum just gives better/orderly/easier ways for the teacher to instruct in given time period, but it doesn’t  give better opportunity for learners to learn/construct their knowledge on curriculum’s content, because knowledge …is not the information, a commodity to be delivered at one end (teacher, book,..) and received, unchanged, at the other ( learner)  but the lesson from experience. Knowledge is about which new or more lucid understanding constructed/retained by learner from the learning process.
As teaching never be direct and as learning does not occur always as result of teaching, changing curriculum or increasing specialization ( new subject disciplines) …etc will not sufficiently solve the lack of creativity, innovation, managerial skills..in our graduands, unless our learning environment expose our learners to situations that require them to resolve the unresolvable tension between being embedded in situations and emerging from embeddedness, which is actually the definition of human development.
I would like to say that today’s teaching ( in Rwanda, I think is the same in many countries too) is its not effective in the sense the students are not in the position to apply  what they have studied in the practical way, which shows that we don’t exactly creating a better learning environment rather an easier teaching environment that focuses only on percentage means mugging up and flushing out every thing after exam.
This shows that our teaching system should reform the way of educating their student for instance following analogy coaching, smart classes were the students can analyse and they can be think in a realistic way,Initiative taking ( even those involving funds uses & project implementations), construct their knowledge mainly based on their interest instead of limited curriculum in terms of time and credits. Make a life in school a pathway to build an experience of problem solving, initiative taking, managerial skills …which are core of successful entrepreneurial character. Otherwise we will be asking our graduands to show/prove what we prevented them to have access to. The quality of education should not be much regarded in how we teach, delivering curriculum content rather than how leanrs are building knowledge from both the process of teaching and learning.
Thanks again for reading and sharing this blog,

Regards

Geographic distribution of One Laptop Per Child countrwide

Since 2009, Rwandan Government through its  One Laptop Per Child program is deploying countrywide the learning laptops to primary aged students, the target is to reach each Rwandan student in grade four of primary school. This distribution is only free to public schools. The deployment is being done following equitable geographical distribution, both rural and urban. At least five primary schools in each district received laptops to each child from grade four to six (P4,P5 & P6). At the end of 2011, more than 141 schools countrywide were benefiting this program, among them 12 private schools mostly located in three districts of Kigali city privately bought laptops through ministry of education. On this Google map, you find the exact location of schools with laptops, each yellow icon represents a school and shows  their respective number of laptops.

View Larger Map

This deployment follows or quickly being followed by  deployment of basic infrastructure like electricity or solar energy, internet connectivity, school server for content and anti-theft protection. For capacity building ,a stream of teacher trainings on how to use these laptops in teaching have been carried out by a special team trained for this purpose.

Good Learning inveronment better job creators!

I agree with Seymour Papert speech to Japan educators. In his speech to Japanese Educators, he cleared how important teaching is, but how much more learning is important. At all levels, learning should be part of some thing real, constructing things, reflecting the knowledge on reality of life, learner should ask him/her self ” Why am I studding this? What should be the impact of what I nam studying to my developement personally and my community’?
This brought me to think about Rwandan student’s path towards a job’s market, do our teaching systems provide to students enough space for dream/vocation/need/interest driven activities? For students to exercise their creativity in different fields of their studies requires financial means, and strong guidance to implement their own projects and space for innovation.
After graduation from different universities, graduates hurry-up to notify ( authenticate) their degrees to apply for jobs, the trust in them to use what they studied is minor despite many years they spend in academic places. The government insists for students to be job creators, entrepreneurs, but look back at their academic calendar, teaching methodology, asseements and learning environment do not really help students to experimentally and practically exercise their ability to create and innovate.

The education should target to solve sustainably the community need. As days bring different need in the community, education should be reformed accordingly. We can’t keep expecting our graduates from high learning institutions to be job creators, entrepreneurs, and self reliable, while our education system and learning environment do not offer opportunities to exercise these processes.

The most needed is not only to have huge number of students and qualified teachers in higher learning intitutions, but also provide opportunity for students to take initiative for new ventures, mostly implementing their own innovative ideas, or ventures based on their research outcomes.

• Reform of academic system to base the academic research to community need for problem solving.
• The reform of academic calenders to include time for creativity and entreprenurial idea development.
• Finacialy assist the identified entrepreunurial idea to be successful.
• Provide time for internship and volunteering to build thier capacity under mentorship model.

How can you measure your creativity

Reading a very short and synthesized presentation done by James C.Kaufman, Ph.D, Learning Research Institute, Californina States University.
In his presentation, he asks a simple question that sheds some light on how creative you are.

He gave three minutes to write down all different answers
Question:
Think of all of the different things that would happen if people did not need sleep. List as many as you can in the next three minutes.
How to measure your creativity?
- First, count how many responses you wrote down for each question. Simply count each one …regardless whether they are good or bad. ” the number of items you have written down is called “Fluency”.

Second divide up your responses into categories–so for the “non-sleep” items, saying ” there would be no pillows” and they would no pyjamas” would count in the same categories. find out how many different types of responses you had the number of the categories you have is called Flexibility.

Third, let’s look for the most original responses, the degree to which your responses are unique is called “originality“.

Finally, consider the level of detail . How much information did you give for each answer? This is called Elaboration.

Enhance Creativity: one of the biggest ways that creativity can be enhanced in the schools can be found in one word “Motivation”

Intrinsic motivation” people who are intrinsically motivated do things because they want to. Here the activity is performed out of enjoyment of the activity.

You might be driven by an outside thing ( need for money, need to be praised your teacher, good grade or an award). All of these motivation are inherently better. People who loves what they do tend to be more creative.

Focus on intrinsic motivation and improve creativity:

• Being able to choose assignments
• Not being overly evaluated or graded
• Focus on making the task enjoyable

Minimize extrinsic motivation and improve creativity:

• To many tangible rewards
• Too much graded work
• Many evaluations
• Observed performance

Some other personal qualities associated with creativity include….

• Tolerance for ambiguity
• Sensible risk-taking
• Being open to new experiences
• Defying the crowd

ESCAF students participated in development of new activity ( XO program) .

Three days in December 19th-20^th, the OLPC -Rwanda learning team worked with 20 students from ESCAF primary school, Nyarugenge District, the activity aimed to test the use of new activity for XO called in its early stage, Portfolio. This activity gathers student’s work and generates a portfolio–generating a slide show from journals entries that have been stared, the slide can be save as PDF or HTML and be shares to assess and visualize what a student learned.

Students were intended to start using this activity and so we can see different changes needed to advise the developers to make it better. During the process, I realized that, we underestimated the student’s ability to critically analyze the activity itself, to like or dislike some features of it and recommend changes to developers by themselves. OLPC-Rwanda set different to watch during the time students were going to be interacting with the activity. Surprisingly, students started right way to tell us different things they fill not comfortable with using the activity, at the end of testing process , most of recommendations sent to developers were directly reported by student on the first or second day of the activity. Fortunately most of changes they suggested were understood and now solved on new version of the activity. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/images/3/3f/Portfolio-20.xo

Students suggested different changes to make this activity better, some like:

- To make a more directive messages right after launching the activity, using the image, sound or animation.

- To be able to add note directly from the thumbnail or slide

- and to increase the resolution of text in the slideshow.

In the new version released after, all the recommendations from ESCAF students have been understood and much regarded. Congratulation to ESCAF students to thier contribution to make a great activity for them selves and the OLPC community worldwide.I am proud of ESCAF Studetns.

Parent’s effort within OLPC Program (CMU students and OLPC-Rwanda 2011)

There are almost three years, Rwandan government started the integration of OLPC program in education, now more than 150 schools are saturated with these Learning tools, all students in Primary grade 4to 6). I remember the former minister of state in charge of primary & secondary education in ministry of education, during the first days of OLPC projects in country of thousand hills, on Rwandan TV saying:”We really want to encourage parents to buy these low cost laptops for their children because they are vital implements in their children’s education, if they need to equip their children with the digital skills necessary in this era,” said Mutsindashyaka Theonest.

Now looking back after two year of OLPC program implementation, seems like his voice has been understood partially. Parents bought privately  around 1800 laptops in 2009 which is an impressive number compared to previous years. Even though   laptops are in hands of their kids ,they are not effectively participating in learning process which is the most important part of OLPC program, because laptop itself is a learning tool rather than just computer to be thrown in kids hands. Participation of parents and other relatives of the school children is vital to the OLPC program. Children learn best by their own discovery, but they need guidance on what to explore and discover, and an opportunity to share the process with others. The children will have much to teach their parents.

What is internationally asked for parents in their agreement with the school?

• I will follow the principles of the OLPC Program 
• The laptop is for my child’s education  
• I will look after the laptop 
• I will make sure the laptop is safely charged 
• I will introduce rules about sharing the laptop at home 
• I will make sure the child brings the laptop to school every day.

An exemplary parent’s interest in OLPC project showed by parents from Camp Kigali Primary School. 150 students from Camp Kigali Primary School benefited a one week activity conducted  by a group of six CMU  Qatar Campus students, where they learnt with how to use some Scratch Activity ( program of XO, helps kid to do simple programming ) and TamTam Activity ( helping kids to compose music).At the end of this CMU-Camp-Kigali PS activity ,parents  and relatives have been invited and on Suterday 09 Jully at OLPC-Rwanda Office at Kacyiru , gathered more than 50 parents all from Camp Kigali Primary School, invited to follow the last day of CMU students activities with their kids. Parents showed high interest in knowing the use of XO, asking many questions about  how to operate it and take care of it. Questions like: What should I do to keep it clean? How should I assist my kids with new programs? What should I do when it has problem? How XO is helping my kids to understand easily his lessons?..etc. have been asked and answered by both OLPC_Rwnda Learning Development Officers.

During the discussions, parents shared idea, and decided to propose to the Headmaster to prepare a  specific OLPC activities at schools for coming holidays,  to continuously assist their kids, deeply learnt  how to operate laptop. The impressive achievement of kid from CMU-students activities motivated parents, to further provide their kids with greater learning environment, at home, school, or else where kids can use laptop. Parents got committed to starts learn how to use laptops, so they can participate actively in learning process of their kids and in OLPC program in general.