Local One Laptop per Child

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Connected Learning: Narrowing Santa Barbara's Digital Divide through the One Laptop per Child Project

One Laptop per Child

Danielle Harlow, Julie Bianchini, Sue Johnson (Education), Phill Conrad (Computer Science), and Susannah Scott (Chemical Engineering)

An interdisciplinary team of faculty in Education, Computer Science, and Chemical Engineering received a $19K Faculty Outreach Grant(FOG).

Inequitable access to the Internet and information technology, referred to as the "digital divide" begins as early as elementary school. Children who do not have access to such technology do not develop the comfort and technology skills that are vital to success in higher education. Moreover, lack of early experiences with technology is a contributing factor to the underrepresentation of minorities and females choosing to major in STEM areas. This disparity in educational opportunity is one that we seek to address.

Studies of programs that provide a laptop to each child report positive gains in student engagement, technology skills, writing, and acquisition of facts and skills. However, supplying laptops to students is insufficient to ensure that the desired learning outcomes are met. Students and teachers must be supported in their learning to integrate technology into their regular classroom activities and appropriate and interesting curriculum must be available that both make use of the technology and connects to California State standards. Finally, the laptops must have software that meets the educational needs of the teachers and students.

With this in mind, we seek to build on a successful pilot program to create an expanded partnership between local and international elementary school teachers and children, scientists, and UCSB faculty and students of education, engineering and computer science. This collaboration will facilitate not only the integration of technology into the classroom of local elementary school children, but will create appropriate curriculum and software that will support and inspire local school children to learn. The goals of the grant are to

  • 1) Extend local implementation to include Cesar Estrada Chavez Dual Language Immersion Charter School in Santa Barbara;
  • 2) Integrate with the CalTeach program at UCSB;
  • 3) Extend international collaboration to include the Esiteti School in Kenya;
  • 4) Implement and test a curriculum model in collaboration with global scientists who will work with students both locally and through video conferencing; and
  • 5) Integrate programming for the XO into a UCSB Computer Science course.

This project will directly benefit local school children at Cesar Estrada Chavez Dual Language Immersion Charter School, Kellogg Elementary School, and school children in Africa and will provide valuable learning experiences for UCSB students in education and computer science.

This project seeks to build on the successful pilot of the use of the XO laptop, a learning platform specifically designed for young children. During the pilot year (2009-2010), we provided XO laptops to a class of third grade students at Kellogg Elementary School. These computers were used to learn math and science skills and content and develop literacy and communication skills. Of particular importance to this project, we equipped students with technology skills that facilitated communication and collaboration. These skills are being leveraged to enable peer-to-peer communication with children in Africa. We have also established collaborations with local scientists in both Santa Barbara and Africa who will work with children in both locations to collect and interpret data and communicate their ideas about science. This year, we propose to extend this project to include the Cesar Estrada Chavez Charter School and the Esiteti School for Masai children of Kenya. We will also introduce new UCSB partners including CalTeach and faculty in Education and Computer Science establishing an expanded partnership between local and international elementary school teachers and children, scientists, and UCSB faculty and students of education, engineering and computer science. This collaboration will facilitate not only the integration of technology into the classroom of local elementary school children, but will create appropriate curriculum and software that will support and inspire children to learn.