Students using their free laptops, courtesy of Uruguay's Plan Ceibal (photo by LIRNE.NET)

World Bank’s Edublog has a post up about an incredibly ambitious educational technology program in Uruguay. Under Plan Ceibal, all students in Uruguayan primary schools (and soon high school students, as well) receive free laptops as part of their public school education. Even better, the schools take steps to ensure that the new technology is put to good use:

Ceibal is about more than just ‘free laptops for kids’ [...].  There is a complementary educational television channel. Schools serve as centers for free community wi-fi, and free connectivity has been introduced in hundreds of municipal centers around the country as well.  There are free local training programs for parents and community members on how to use the equipment.”

Giving laptops to students is a great first step in broadening their educational opportunities, but the free wi-fi and added connectivity benefit the communities that the schools are a part of, as well. Also striking is the way the plan was implemented, with an emphasis on areas where educational improvements were most needed:

Notably, and tellingly, Plan Ceibal rolled out first in rural and poor communities, with schools in the capital city of Montevideo reached only in the final stage of deployment.  This stands in stark contrast to the way educational technologies make their way into schools and communities pretty much everywhere else in the world, where urban population centers and wealthy communities are typically first in line [...].”

What’s awesome about this program is that it’s aimed at a central challenge in improving education worldwide. Education is about access, and something as simple as connecting students to the internet could lead to incredible gains, especially in places where schools are strapped for resources, or where schools barely exist at all. This is one problem we try to address with our GMAT prep and LSAT prep courses; since all the teaching is online, we can reach students who may not have access to the test centers that students in major U.S. cities take for granted.

Unequipped classrooms, dearths of textbooks, the costs of school supplies — all these obstacles can be made less pressing by insisting that connectivity is a basic educational requirement. Granted, laptop programs are not miracle cures. There’s a key difference between information and education. If there weren’t, we could all quit school and just rely on Wikipedia.

For technology to better primary and high school education, teachers have to be brought on board with every advance that is made, parents have to be able to follow what their kids are learning, and students have to be shown ways to explore, filter, and evaluate the vast body of knowledge (and junk) they encounter online.

Ceibal is exciting, though, because it’s applying a simple mission on a massive scale. The futures of education and technology are intertwined. As learning evolves, students deserve the resources to keep up.

[Edublog] How do you evaluate a plan like Ceibal?

Related posts:

1. Business schools working harder to attract international MBAs
2. GMAT students, welcome to your redesigned syllabus page
3. Keeping students in the driver’s seat

Alex Sarlin is Lead Verbal Developer for Graduate Programs at Knewton, specializing in GMAT prep.

Karen Cator, the former Director of Education and Leadership at Apple, was just appointed as the US Department of Education’s new head of the Office of Educational Technology.

Combined with the fact that $650MM that has been committed to educational tech by the federal government, this means that she could have a LOT of say about the next generation of educational tech policy in public schools.
What’s exciting about this to me (and why I’m sharing it with all of you) is that the government seems to be getting in line with private educational tech companies’ vision of the future and putting money toward implementing it in schools.

Here’s the press release.

This is a scribd slideshow by Cator about her beliefs about educational tech. Some of the interesting things regarding our work here are her focus on

1) Student experience
2) User-generated content
3) 24-7 access to educational content
4) Communication and collaboration

Related posts:

1. Should all teachers post their syllabi and curricula online?
2. Uruguay plan gives laptops, wireless to students in nation’s public schools
3. The promise of online education (and the hurdles in its way)