Cuts on education ... and laptops

Submitted by Sabine Eller on Fri, 10/17/2008 - 09:17.

I just read a letter to a newspaper by a parent who is quite concerned about the future education of his son because today is not yesterday and having one teacher in primary school teaching the whole group of pupils is much more complicated that it was before. The sociocultural context where the pupils come from nowadays is very different.

This takes me to a project which aims to get low cost laptops to schools. Our kids today anyway deal with them and of course computers are not able to offer the same interactivity as a teacher does, but for many particular things they can help to vary the individual study programme of kids.

Besides that every day our kids carry loads of stuff to school and back home. Mine are in the second class and on an ordinary day they have 5 hours = 5 subjects - for example: Italian, Mathematics, English, Geography, Musics

this means: 2+2+1 books and 2+2+1+1+1 copybooks

then you add: the calendar, the pens (with all the colours etc.), half a liter of water, something to eat and the weight of the schoolbag itself ...

Much of the contents could be made available through a low cost laptop, like the ones from Asus, but there are now more and more out on the market. Considering also the world wide economical situation learning with laptops, which for example run under edubuntu, the educational version of ubuntu, can save quite some money to the ministries, to parents and make scoolbags less heavy. 

Learning Without Borders helps to get this on the way and more and more educational resources  become available for free. Projects like SUPRA from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany, providing science and history educational contents for primary school under a free license can be found more and more often. This material just needs translation - first of all into languages like English, French, Spanish and then from there into all other languages .

Besides that many books are already available out there for free, for anybody to use.
So why not go this way?

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