Thanks to the XO laptops, I have been able to offer 20 kids an eduational revolution. I am the director of Aziza's Place; an orphanage/learning center for children that primarily come from Stung Mean Chey( Phnom Penh's Dumpsite) and we have been open for just under a year. Because of luck and circumstances I have been given the opportunity to offer the 20 children that live at Aziza's their own individual XO laptop. Thanks to the North American donors who purchased them through the One-Laptop-per-Child and because of Elaine Negroponte's curiosity I have been given this unique opportunity to offer 20 children a unique opportunity to learn in a new exciting way that puts the focus on the children's own creative exploration.
I was invited to an education workshop which in the end I wasn't able to attend because I was sick. When I heard that the workshop was in fact a demo/tutorial on how the XO laptops work, I didn't feel as bad that I wasn't able to attend because with 9 computers for 20 kids, Aziza's Place has one of the best child-computer ratio in Cambodia. I didn't feel that we really needed or deserved these $100 laptops, when we have so many computers and so many other schools in cambodia have so few, if any computers. What I didn't know or realize is that these laptops are not just laptops. In fact the XO offers children an exciting and new way of learning.
Luckily for us, Elaine became interested in Aziza's Place when she heard that I was an artist. She came for a tour of Aziza's and even after I told her that I wasn't looking to receive any of the XO's, she thought that we should give them a try and so we decided on 6 laptops because we have 6 kids that don't go home on weekends like the other 14 children that have families and a home to go to on Saturday night. I was thinking that this would be a way of offering the 24/7 kids something else to do on Sundays while they wait for the rest of the kids(24/6) to come back on Sunday evenings. Sundays have been very long for these kids while the rest get a break from Aziza's and get to hang out with their siblings and parents.
The moment we opened up the boxes and started to play with the XO's I realized that these were much more than just fun, cool looking laptops. All of a sudden these kids had in their hands all the tools they would need to chat, make videos, take pictures, compose and edit music, paint and write, learn math, science, geography...instead of playing games the laptops encourages to program and develop their own games! Because we have a focus on Arts and Education, this was exactly what I was looking for without knowing that they even existed!
Almost immediately I realized that we are going to have a problem though....the cat was out of the bag and there was no going back. I wanted to completely change our curriculum to incorporate the XO's into Aziza's Place. How could I take the laptops away from the kids and tell them to stop the creative exploration that they had embarked on and put everything on hold until next Saturday night? How could I restrict this creative explosion to only 6 out of the 20 kids?
Luckily for me(and especially the kids) Elaine had come to the same conclusion and the next day I had a wonderful email waiting for me in my Inbox saying that she had been thinking of our place and because of our small size Aziza's would be the perfect place to saturate with the XO and indeed give one laptop per child. She had 15 more XO's waiting for us to pick up! I was able to offer our kids a revolution. There was a before and an after at Aziza's, and here we were with the tools to completely change the way that these kids learn. My problem now was that we do not have enough time to let these kids explore the capabilities that the XO has to offer because they have a very full schedule from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed. In addition to attending Public School, the kids study English, Computer, Art, Math, Karate Khmer and traditional Khmer Dance. Including playtimes, three meals a day, movies twice a week the kids had everything scheduled from 6 AM to 9:30 PM. The only solution I could see was to incorporate the Xo into the classroom experience. Only Dance, Art and Karate would be left untouched, but other-wise, nothing would ever be the same.
I am very excited about this, but because my background is in Art and not Education, I don't feel qualified to make or change a curriculum, but I see no other way but to have faith in the kids to explore for themselves and take advantage of the creative possibilities that these laptops offer them. Children are inherently curious and resourceful and I feel like if I could just give them the chance to explore, with some guidance, I don't se how we could go wrong. Elaine has been extremely encouraging and giving me the confidence to take the leap and trust the kids. Having said all that, I am still a little nervous about the unknown. It is very exciting, but at the same time I don't want to change so much that we are in fact distracting the kids. I don't believe this will be the case, but it is possible that we will have to have two different programs; one where the children are replacing some of their classes with the XO, but all of the kids will be incorporating the XO's in to their classes. Like I said, I do have faith in the kids and I guess I want to believe that the open-source community out there will keep developing software that will enable these kids to stay interested and focused once the honeymoon of the "new toy" feeling wears off.
It has been suggested to me that the English teacher could use the XO's to record the proper pronunciation for vocabulary. In our Math class, we have been letting the kids play the memorization games, and through the chat/networking activities, we have been able to keep the children interacting with the teachers, but now instead of raising their hands, they type the answers in the laptops and post them for the teacher to see. The possibilities seem endless, especially once we get a handle on how these things work.
I am very curious to see how other educators have been implementing these into the classroom. Any ideas or suggestions would be eagerly accepted. Does anybody know of any English Language software available for the XO's? Also, one things that has come up a lot s that sometimes the mouse (the track-pad) goes a little crazy and it becomes impossible to navigate. Sometimes it has gone away by itself and other times we have had to re-boot. The only other thing that comes to mind was that today, one of the computers was somehow locked on Cap-Lock and we couldn't figure out how to unlock and again, we had to re-boot.
A small price to pay as far as I am concerned for how much we are getting out of them.
Well, I wanted to share my story, but I will try to post my experiences up on this blog and I will definitely be asking questions from here in the future. The revolution has begun!
Nader Ebrahimi
Director of Aziza's Place
Phnom Penh
No comments:
Post a Comment