On Saturday, I took a trip with Flor de Ceibo to the country, north of Montevideo near a town called Tala. The trip was a “diagnostic visit,” and the event was held in a community center next to a school, surrounded by farms. A few dozen community members showed up, and students from the College of Agriculture at the University of the Republic gave presentations about the geography and economy of the region and its needs. Afterwards, there were hamburgers, soda, and pastries. I’m not entirely sure what was being diagnosed, or really how it related to Plan Ceibal at all, but it was cool to see another part of the country and get to talk to the other students in the group more. Here’s the gathering in the community center:

Monday, I went with Pablo and Cesar to another blogging workshop in the town of Salinas, about an hour outside of Montevideo. It was held at a large elementary school (with about 800 kids) in a suburban neighborhood just off the highway. When we arrived, we found a few groups of kids using their XOs. They were far too absorbed to notice us posing for photos.

A group of a few dozen teachers, all of them women, was waiting for us. Cesar and Pablo introduced Tus Ideas Valen and ceibalJAM! Pablo had created a test blogspot site, and asked them to comment on a post with their idea of what a blog was. Most of the teachers weren’t familiar with blogs, or really the Internet in general. When Pablo put the URL of the test blog on the board, many of them typed it into Google instead of the address bar, and many of the comments they posted were along the lines of “we don’t know, we’re here to learn!” But they all seemed to be having a great time figuring it out, and by the end of the workshop had an idea of what a blog is and how tools like Blogger function.

Video coming soon!

I’m going to spend a week traveling in Northern Argentina before I fly home.  I’m still finishing up a few things via the Internet, and I’ll be writing a summary/reflection for ISTS/Neukom, so there will be at least one more post coming!

The work with Flor de Ceibo (the group from the University of the Republic) is slow going, and I’m slow to understand what does happen. For the Uruguayan students, Flor de Ceibo is a much longer program, so they’re not in a rush. A few trips have been cancelled, and I missed one last weekend because the leaders didn’t call to tell me until the night before, and I stupidly didn’t have my phone on me, or even check it until Sunday. There’s supposed to be one this weekend and then again next week before I leave Montevideo.

With ceibalJAM!, I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to put together a larger project, and I’ll focus on it for the rest of my time here. The idea, called “blog-pals” is a website that will link the blogs of Uruguayan classrooms to each other, and hopefully to classes in the U.S. as well. There will be a theme for the entries every week or two, and games that teach some related vocabulary in English and Spanish that they can then use in their blog entries. Various logistical and technical issues (for example, Flash doesn’t work great on the XOs) have made this a longer project than I envisioned. At this point, my goal before leaving is to modify a geography game ceibalJAM! volunteers already wrote called Conozco Uruguay (“I know Uruguay”) to teach vocabulary instead. The website probably won’t get finished before I leave, especially with the Flor de Ceibo trips planned, but hopefully my summer term classes will not control my life and I can stay involved via the Internet. There is another blogging workshop next week too, in the town of Salinas.  I should have more interesting updates in a week or so!

At the end, Roxana is telling Nelson that volunteers are working on more games he can play this way, and asking what he thinks–that’s what elicits the big smile.

Saturday was ceibalJAM7! (The exclamation mark is part of the name). So far I’ve been to miniJAMs, which meet for a few hours to work on one development project. A full ceibalJAM, however, takes most of a day and breaks into groups to work on a variety of projects. There were five projects at this one:

-Pippy, a game that teaches the basics of programming in Python.

-Creating more examples and class plans for Scratch, which also teaches programming.

-Making programs accessible for kids with disabilities

-Conozco, originally a quiz game about Uruguay’s geography that is now being extended to other topics.

-Exploring possibilities for new games using a tool called pygame.

Despite the fact that all of the buses and most of the taxis were on strike, there was a good-sized crowd with a wide range of programming backgrounds.  Here’s a photo of the Scratch group working on the laptops.  Video to come.

A short video about the event is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=219hWnCJ00A

On Monday, I had my first meetings with the groups from Flor de Ceibo that I’ll be working with. The first group, which will be working in rural areas, is almost all girls, many of whom are studying education or psychology. The second group is more mixed and has many engineering students. It’s hard for me to understand long talks in Spanish, so I hope I’m not missing crucial information. In the evening, there was a larger event for all of the Flor de Ceibo groups, and several people gave talks about how Flor de Ceibo has evolved, its importance to society, and the sorts of problems facing Plan Ceibal. For example, one goal is for the laptops to be a resource for parents as well, so they discussed reasons parents weren’t using the computer–some don’t know how, some are afraid of breaking it, some thought it was just for kids, etc. There are more meetings this week, and next weekend I’m going to visit a school in Rivera with the second group.

Mariana taught the kids’ workshop. I’m not sure how long this school has had laptops (they were phased in over a few years), but the kids seemed to know their way around the computers and the Internet well. Many of them had stickers of cartoons or fútbol logos on their laptops. They all had email addresses and more or less knew what a blog was. More importantly, they seemed comfortable exploring and Googling things to figure out what they didn’t know. Mariana started by asking them what a blog was, why someone would make one, and how they are different from other websites. One of my favorite moments was when she asked a few kids their fútbol team preferences, then asked, “if Cristian and Ana both have blogs about fútbol, but Cristian roots for Nacional and Ana roots for Peñarol, are they the same?” Loud chorus of “NO!” Then they set about learning how to set up a blog. The EduBlog software isn’t ready yet, so they used Blogger, the same tool I’m using for this blog. It was Saturday, and they had come to school just for the workshop, but none of them seemed at all bored or eager to leave. Mariana, who has a master’s degree in technology education, told me it was ideal when the students taught each other, and that’s exactly what happened. Even though they each have their own laptop, they spent a lot of the time walking around, looking over each other’s shoulders and learning from each other. This is an advantage of the small, durable laptops–it would be harder to do that in a computer lab with desktops, or even regular (fragile) laptops. It was a cool dynamic that you don’t see that often–kids can’t usually walk around and check out each other’s math worksheets.

While Mariana talked about what a blog is, most of the kids already had their laptops open and were surfing around as she talked. It didn’t seem to keep them from paying attention, though, and that really is how you learn about the Internet. They’re very eager to learn a little bit and then go play with it, while the adults tend to want more specific instructions. The kids were so excited to show their teacher their blogs, and even more excited when he suggested they go downstairs and teach the adults what they had learned, like they’re doing here:

Diego spoke to the group of adults, and went into more detail showing how different parts of Blogger work. My first impression was that the adults looked frustrated and weren’t having as much fun as the kids were. I can’t understand everything that’s being said, so I don’t completely trust my interpretations, but it would make sense. Andrew told me that like in the US, there is often a generation gap, where the students know more about the computers than the teachers. Not all of them had computers to try things out right away; a lot were taking notes on paper. But when the kids came downstairs to show them the blogs they’d made, the room got a lot more lively. Before we left, Diego and Mariana signed a certificate for each kid saying they had completed a blogging workshop.

Then I went to the miniJAM I wrote about before, that focused on the arts. Many people there were artists and teachers who hadn’t been involved with ceibalJAM before, so there was a presentation about what ceibalJAM does and how the arts are incorporated. Then everyone got to experiment with a table full of XOs (and their art-related applications):

I’ve been doing some translation work this week. When we get a few technical issues resolved, I’ll be editing down the video from the workshop, and hopefully posting some of it here. Tomorrow I’m helping out at an event called FLISOL, whose name translates to Latin American Free Software Installation Festival.

The miniJAM this Saturday will focus on applications for the XO that allow students to create art in various ways, as well as figuring out how CeibalJAM can incorporate artists and designers. So, one of my current jobs is to make artistic masterpieces like this:

I’m testing out a bunch of new art-related applications, figuring out which ones are buggy, and taking screenshots and writing descriptions of what you can do with each so we’ll have a summary for Saturday afternoon. For example, this program (TuxPaint) still has English directions in a few places, which could confuse the kids, so I take note of issues like that while I get in touch with my inner six-year-old. On Saturday morning, I’m visiting a school for the first time to help out with a blogging workshop in Maldonado, a small city east of Montevideo near Punta del Este. My work with Flor de Ceibo is supposed to start on Monday. I’ll be part of two of their groups–one working in rural areas, and another working in the city of Rivera on the Brazilian border–I’m excited to see some more of the country!

There’s a Wikipedia link, Skype, “Tortuga Art,” which is like Logo, a calculator, a chat program, a text editor, a web browser, a paint program, and a bunch of games that are less clear to me. One, called “Pippy,” seems to teach some basic programming–not something I learned in elementary school! But the games aren’t big, pretty, multilevel programs like Oregon Trail or Gizmos and Gadgets or the other supposedly educational games that caused everyone to fight over computer time when I was in elementary school. There’s a simple maze game, a tetris game that uses math, a quiz game about cities in Uruguay, etc. I guess the Internet connection is probably the most important thing, but it still seems weird that these games are so much more basic than what American students were playing a decade ago.

I’m still figuring out exactly how the different volunteer groups fit together. Pablo, who helped me arrange my work here, mostly coordinates CeibalJAM.  This is a group that works on programs for the XO computers. He also directed Blogging Desde Infancia, which apparently has now been replaced with Tus Ideas Valen (something along the lines of “Your Ideas Have Value”). Yesterday I met Cesar and Nathalie, who are working with this group. CeibalJAM provides technical help to Tus Ideas Valen.

So far, the schools participating in the blogging project have used tools like WordPress and Blogger, which are free and accessible but definitely not designed for six-year-olds. So CeibalJAM has written its own version, called EduBlog, which is much simpler and has features designed for the classroom. For example, rather than sending a forgotten password to an email address, a teacher can restore access. However, the site is still very buggy, and the user guide is very brief. So, my current job is to test all the different parts of the site to figure out where the bugs are, and to work on English and Spanish versions of two user guides–a detailed one for teachers, and a simpler one for the kids. 

Cesar and Nathalie asked me what I was most interested in working on, and said that there are tons of jobs and almost everyone’s a volunteer so I should make sure to tell them what I enjoy. I had no idea what to say (not in English, and definitely not in Spanish), because I don’t really know how the organization functions or what jobs there are to do. But it sounds promising! 

Saturday, I went to a miniJAM–a meeting where CeibalJAM volunteers get together to discuss what needs to be done and then work on some projects together.  Meetings take place in a building that is eventually going to be a small art museum.

When I’m not working with CeibalJAM and Tus Ideas Valen, I’ll be working with Flor de Ceibo, the group from the university.  This is a separate group that works with kids in the classrooms using what software has already been developed.  I’ll be working with two groups–one that works in cities in the interior of the country, and one that works in rural areas.  I’m really looking forward to seeing more of the country.

The main volunteer group is called Red de Apoyo de Plan Ceibal (Network of Support for Plan Ceibal). I’m going to be working with two offshoots of this organization. The first is Blogging Desde Infancia (Blogging Since Infancy), which runs blogging workshops across the country where volunteers show kids how to use blogs and other social media tools. The second group, Flor de Ceibo, is based at the Universidad de la República, Uruguay’s largest university. They provide more general support by helping out in classrooms, organizing events for parents, and providing tech support. The specific details of what I’ll be doing are a little unclear at this point, despite the fact that I’ve been planning for months, but I guess I’ll find out!