The Ceibal Project

The other night I watched the movie “Savages” and at the beginning of the movie you see one of the guys volunteering in Africa with a child with a white and green lap top. The guy goes into talking how in Africa children can get theses lop tops and that they only cost $14 to make.

I have seen on T.V. adds about if you buy I don’t remember what the company will donate one lap top to a child in Africa.

This lap top program is call “Plan Ceibal” and it was develop and implemented in Uruguay although it was inspired by Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop per Child project.

The plan is 5 years old and it was implemented to give every school child in the country a lap top and to introduce computer technology in every elementary and secondary school.

The plan also has installed a no-cost internet access in every school throughout the country. Children in private schools can buy the lap tops at cost.

The government wanted to improve the quality of education through the new technological system by providing computers to every scholar and teacher of the public education and to promote the same opportunities for all. Not only opportunity for the children that could afford to buy a regular lap top.

I have seen this lap tops and they are great, they are not pretty by any means, but they are steady and they had the same programs that a regular lap top. However not all children get the same programs, they are distribute by age and school grade, as they advance in their education they get new and more advance programs.

Ceibal =  Cockspur coral tree, is an indigenous flower tree of Uruguay and in this case it stands for  "Conectividad Educativa de Informática Básica para el Aprendizaje en Línea" =  Educational Connectivity of Basic Computing for Online Learning.

Many delegates from different countries had come to Uruguay to study the plan and they had implemented it in their own countries, and in many of those countries the plan is also called Ceibal.

Also the UNESCO had presented workshops in different countries about this program.

Next blog I will give my opinion about the movie.