Alex Little

I attended my first English lesson in about 20 years this morning when I visited the Maiwayni School in Mekelle to see their trial of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. OLPC trials are being run at a few other schools in Ethiopia, but this is the first in the Tigray region. It’s a model school for the area and has very good facilities for it’s 600+ students and staff.

Around 100 students of grades 6 and 7 were given the XO laptops just over 2 weeks ago. Teachers were given a one day workshop in how to use the laptops and how they can use them in their teaching. Technical support for the laptops is provided by MIT (probably not the one you’re thinking of, but the more local Mekelle Institute of Technology), though so far they’ve had few technical problems. Students can charge the laptops up at home if they have electricity (and the electricy is on), or there are charging facilities at school – unfortunately not solar power (Matt, if you’re after a project, then come over and fix up a solar panel for them!).

I didn’t get chance to talk to the students/teachers/parents to find out what they felt about having the laptops, although the head and deputy head seemed very keen and happy they were chosen to be the trial school.

Before going into the class, the headmaster (Tsegay) gave us chance to have a little play around. At first I found the interface was a little tricky to navigate, but once I’d got the hang of it, it was fine. As well as the games and cut down Wikipedia, all the grade 6 and 7 text books (mainly in Amharic and Tigrinya) have been scanned in and pre-loaded as ebooks. During the English lesson, all the students (around 55 in total) had grade 7 English ebook opened at the right point – I was half expecting most of the children at the back to be playing with the games!

Most of the students seemed to be taking an active part in the lesson, even if it meant having their hand up for a while before the teacher had chance to get to them. The use of the XO laptop in the lesson we observed was restricted to using it as an alternative to a paper textbook – I didn’t get the feeling the lesson would have been much different if all the students had had a paper textbook in front of them. However, it is still very early days for this school and the students have only had the laptops for a couple of weeks to get to grips with them, at least the students here each had a copy of the ebook – unlike many schools where there aren’t enough paper textbooks to go around. Also, it will probably take some time (and more workshops) for the teachers to gain experience in how to make best use of their new IT facilities.

It will be interesting to see how things have changed if I can get to visit the school again in a few months time.