Nepal’s OLPC deployments are now more than seven months old. I get a lot of questions about deployment issues and solutions. I hope the following information is helpful. First, a snapshot of our deployments: OLE’s progress in Nepal Deployments began at Vishwamitra Ganesh and Bashuki public schools on April 23rd, 2008. 135 XO-1 laptops deployed to students in classes 2 and 6 0 laptops stolen, lost, or otherwise missing. One laptop has been seriously damaged…
The office is getting crowded, really crowded. On Monday, we will have a total 21 people in the office full-time. That doesn’t count volunteers that come in and out of the office. What do we do w/ 21 whole people?  6 full-time activity developers + Ties 1 full-time curriculum expert – the super-creative, super-wacky Kamana Regmi 2 full-time graphic designers – who develop the graphics for E-Paath (formerly E-Paati) Saurav, our education director Rajeev, who…
Manoj and Neema are in our offices today for technical training. Manoj and Neema were the star students in last week’s teacher training session. Unfortunately, Neema will only be w/ us today and return on Friday for more training. We’ve got Manoj for the next three days. Here is the rough training schedule we have in mind Monday (today) How to update the firmware, use test-all, and test individual hardware pieces how to install an…
I took yesterday off after 10 days of working from 8 am to 10 pm. No e-mail, no computer besides listening to LUG Radio and LinuxActionShow. Some reflections. Teacher training was amazing. The excitement, enthusiasm, and commitment of the teachers was inspiring. The next time I hear someone put down Nepali teachers I will be hard pressed not to smack them upside the head. Teaching is not a well-paying job in Nepal and these teachers…
Banner for the Teacher Training Program Saurav Dev Bhatta, Bipul Gautam, and Kamana Regmi designed the teacher training program. Sulochan Acharya and Bryan Berry provided technical assistance. Bipul is the lead teacher trainer and is steeped in the theories and practices of different educational schools but Vygotskian Social Cognition and Piaget’s theories of development have influenced him the most. The session started with an opening ceremony. Our guests of honor were by the Director of…
I will be writting alot about this weekend’s 4-day teacher training program. We are training 24 teachers from Bashuki and Bishwamitra schools and roughly 7 individual from Nepal’s government education bodies. Here are just some quick technical notes. The Classroom Setup. We have the teachers facing each other just as we want the students to face each other in the classroom. This will reduce the risk of XO’s falling forward off the front of their narrow…
We are very excited that Kamana Regmi recently joined our content Development Team. Mrs. Regmi has over 14 years of experience teaching mathematics and science at the primary level, as well as training primary school teachers. Her duties will include assessing the applicability of existing open-source education materials, guiding the development of new materials, and determining how to best integrate our materials into Nepali classrooms. Mrs. Regmi has attended training courses at the prestigious Bank…