MK speaks EN

Two months ago UNDP started a project with OLPC in Macedonia. Two classrooms were set up with 25 laptops each in early September when the school year begun. The news about the project were made available to the public last week when a major newspaper printed a story about the project.



I visited OU "Vojdan Chernodrinski" that is one of the primary schools that have a OLPC classroom to see what's going on. The kids that are using the XO laptops are in the second grade. They seemed very enthusiastic when I entered the classroom. They were chatting on the laptops and telling each other what they wrote to their friends. They had no obvious problems using the laptops although the interface is in English. Some of them even explained to me what kind of things they do and how to use some of the software.

As I understood, classes in mathematics and Macedonian language are held using the laptops. The children are allowed to take them home and do homework.



As a part of the UNDP project and with cooperation from OLPC the teachers had gone through some training so they can apply adequate teaching methods using the laptop.

One of the problems is the fact that there is no Cyrillic keyboard available on the XOs. That means that the kids type Macedonian in the Latin Allahabad which could be counterproductive at their age. However, I hope that UNDP will solve this issue in cooperation with the local Free Software community.

The goal of this project is to serve as a recommendation to the Government of Macedonia in future investments in technology for schools. With the recent purchase of NComputing hardware with Ubuntu, it might seem that the Government made its mind about this, and maybe the OLPC project is rolling out a bit too late even though we still haven't seen the classrooms with NComputing's products.

I would like to believe that OLPC still has a chance in Macedonia.

Source: OLPC@Macedonia. Written by: Novica Nakov.

Labels: education, technology