I'm shocked that I didn't post about this before, but last June, the city of Florence, Italy, donated 5,000 XO laptops to four schools in Ethiopia - Menilik and Atse Naod Primary Schools in Addis Ababa, Muloosayoo Primary School in Oromia Region and Rema Primary School in Amhara Region. These schools were chosen based on the willingness of school directors and staff to engage in the implementation, representation of less or least privileged parts of the society in the school and the size of the school
The donation is being implemented by the Engineering Capacity Building Program (ecbp), which produced this video to explain their participation and vision for One Laptop Per Child in Ethiopia:
During the pilot phase of this project 170 teachers from the four selected schools were given OLPC teachers' training. Now the teachers are integrating them into their classrooms and textbooks are being digitalized and loaded onto the XO laptops. Soon, I hope we'll have reports on the XO impact coming from ecbp.
The video looks good and shows what the XO can do in the field.
It is a shame they are using an older version XO! If you look closely, you can see they are using a prototype XO and not the latest one. In the video, the XO's shown have dimples on the Wifi ears.
That video is outdated, from the initial pilots. The 5000 laptops now deployed are the current mass produced model (OLPC XO-1 C2).
Also, the laptops were not entirely donated by Florence - some were, but others came from the Give portion of the first G1G1.
5000 XOs came from the 2007 G1G1. Florence donated 300. All of these laptops are mass production units.
Alas, bad timing...
http://www.africanews.com/site/Ethiopia_Lack_of_funding_collapsing_OLPC/list_messages/23495
Alas, bad timing...
http://www.africanews.com/site/Ethiopia_Lack_of_funding_collapsing_OLPC/list_messages/23495