Laptops Enliven Education in Rural Peru

As I work on the Madville Times year-in-review and wish list for 2008 (the 2007 list was way off, but hope springs eternal!), I find a great deal written on these pages and elsewhere about laptop computers in the classroom. A review of that topic will follow...

...but said review must acknowledge this heartening report from Peru, where the One Laptop program appears to be having some success. Peru -- poor, rural, ranked at the bottom of worldwide education stats -- bought 272,000 of the rugged XO laptops, the largest single order yet placed with One Laptop. Computers are going to remote villages, each loaded with (among other features) audio and video recording equipment, music software, drawing software, and 100 books.

Think about that: 100 books -- and that's before Peru gets the Internet to every village. How many little Abe Lincolns might these computers reach?

The kids are all over the machines (see the pictures in the article):

At breakfast, they're already powering up the combination library/videocam/audio recorder/music maker/drawing kits. At night, they're dozing off in front of them - if they've managed to keep older siblings from waylaying the coveted machines [Frank Bajak, AP technology writer, "Laptop Project Enlivens Peruvian Hamlet," TheState.Com, Columbia, SC, 2007.12.24].

The article doesn't offer any rigorous analysis of gains in academic achievement in the six months that the village of Arahuay has had the laptops. There will be time enough for that. But the quantum leap in educational opportunity seems clear. It's not like South Dakota, where we splurge on fancy swivel-top computers and software updates, and then create a system so firewalled that students and teachers alike find it easier to research and work on their home computers. The kids in Peru don't have home computers. They may not have home pencils. The One Laptop program brings a world of resources and possibilities that their parents couldn't have dreamed of even a decade ago.

One more comparison to chew on: Madison High School is spending $650,000 to cover 430 Tablet PCs for its students for three years. A similar amount of money would buy over 3200 XO laptops. Heck, under One Laptop's "Give One, Get One" program, we could get 430 XO's for our school and donate another 430 to kids in Botswana, Sri Lanka, wherever, for a mere $172,000.

Oh my -- I think I just found a way to save 70% on South Dakota's Classroom Connections program, transfer the money to teacher salaries, and do good for the rest of the world to boot.