14 DAY TRIAL // The One Laptop Per Child charity foundation is heading towards the Peru villages this week in order to offer notebook training for the teachers from remote rural villages. The organization will set up training centers in a few regional cities, where teachers will meet the green, rugged XO notebooks.
Teachers will be the first to receive technical information and training regarding the inexpensive ultra-mobile computers as part of the largest program of its kind worldwide. Peru has placed earlier this year a massive order of about 400,000 machines to populate the classrooms in the poorest schools, that are practically severed from the civilized world.
The first batch of 25,000 XO notebooks have already reached a Lima warehouse and are undergoing inventory. The whole 400,000 units will be deployed to 6000 schools in a short while.
Teachers training is a key factor for the development of the program, as this is the part that is alleged to make the project a success across the country. The next in line awaiting for guidance are the parents and the kids that will actually use the machines as part of their educational process. As part of the training, teachers are expected to become familiar with maintaining and operating the ultra-mobile PCs, as well as to implement the laptop in the educational curricula.
Apart from the Debian-based Sugar operating system, the laptops will be shipped with 115 pre-installed electronic books, including textbooks, novels, and poetry, art and music programs. Each notebook will ship with a webcam and other goodies to facilitate communication and the laptop-centric education process.
Despite its mesh-networking capabilities, the notebooks will not be able to open Internet's gates to their users, as more than 90 percent of the targeted villages don't have Internet access in either wired or wireless flavors.
The updated content will be delivered in a new way, also referred to as "sneaker-net." When teachers come to collect their paychecks at the regional education offices, they will be able to connect their notebooks to the net, then fetch the new content to the classrooms.