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Recent media coverage of our Laptops for Teachers program. English subtitles coming soon…

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Our Laptops for Teachers pilot program has been launched with great hurrah and success with 12 local teachers from two schools. See more photos over on our flickr page.

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EDURELIEF’S LAPTOPS FOR TEACHERS

We are proud to announce that Edurelief has just launched an exciting new program in our ongoing endeavor to promote education in Mongolia. Laptops for Teachers is a program that provides teachers with laptops at 0% interest loans to aid them in their efforts of educating Mongolia’s youth. We’ve been dreaming about this program for a long time and are beside ourselves with excitement that it is finally happening. We delivered our very first laptop this month and are working hard to put together a pilot program for 10 other teachers. We’ve never seen 10 applicant spots fill so fast, demand is huge.


MEET NATSAGDORJ

Meet Natsagdorj, the first teacher to benefit from our Laptops for Teachers program. Natsagdorj is a 62-year-old Mongolian language teacher and one of only two teachers in the entire country that has a doctorate in teaching Traditional Mongolian Script. Natsagdorj has had a great need for a laptop to continue his research and textbook writing so he can pass his knowledge onto other teachers and students but until becoming a part Edurelief’s Laptops for Teachers program, was unable to afford one. Thanks to our 0% interest loan and the ability to pay over an extended period of time, he chose to split up his payments over the next six months and has already started working on a new textbook. It is our hope that with seed money from investors we will be able to provide many more teachers in Mongolia with laptops and thus vastly improving their ability to prepare lessons, share curriculum, and promote education.

YOU CAN FUND A TEACHER’S LAPTOP LOAN

Help us invest in Mongolian education by helping teachers to purchase laptops. These teachers are working face-to-face with children daily and being able to do research, plan lessons, and write and share curriculum makes a huge impact on the development of education. A $500 donation covers the cost of a new laptop, as well as shipping and customs fees related to getting the laptop into the hands of a teacher. This cost is still well below market price in Mongolia and since teachers can split up their loan into as many as 12 monthly payments it’s an opportunity that many will benefit from. After the loan is fully repaid we simply use those funds to purchase another laptop. What does this mean for you? It means that over the course of several years, your $500 donation is reused over and over again, aiding teachers and promoting education in Mongolia. Help make a difference today, invest in a teacher.

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Six Ways to Improve Educational Laptops - An Open Letter to Intel and OLPC.

Dear Intel and OLPC,

Your Classmate and XO laptops need a killer app. That app is educational material.

Don’t get me wrong, kids love your products, I love them too, they are greatly needed in this time to help bridge the ever widening digital divide. But if your products aren’t created from the beginning to match government education standards then how can they ever be worth the $200 - $400 you charge for them?

To give a current example, let’s look at Mongolia, a country that recently received a large funding grant from the World Bank to introduce 20,000 OLPC XO laptops to Mongolian children. This is a great program which I’m sure will benefit a lot of schools and children. But we are talking about Mongolia, a country whose education system cannot even afford to provide textbooks for its children. If Mongolia cannot provide $20 of textbooks per child, how can it hope to afford maintaining 20,000 $200 laptops? The XO laptop is great, it helps them learn creatively and connect with other students and use different learning tools, but can they study on it? If their school can’t afford their math or history books have you worked with the school system to come up with a way to put electronic copies of those books on these laptops? Or will schools have to take care of maintaining the machine as well as buy books they already cannot afford? 

The educational laptop is a great humanitarian idea. It is an effort that could lead to great things in countries that have, until now, had limited access to technology, especially for children. Yet, I do not see how pitching these machines to countries at this point is going to do much besides provide an expensive toy to a few lucky schools. The hardware is pretty much spot on, but the software needs an overhaul. Instead of simply providing a product capable of revolutionizing education in the developing world you need to create one that actually will. Developing countries have a hard enough time funding the education of their children, your dream is honorable, even revolutionizing, but something’s got to change or else we’ll just end up with another product that kids love, but doesn’t bring the change we’re looking for.

Here are some new rules on how to make your laptops worth the money, and truly justify your claim of helping kids in developing nations get a better education.

Government required textbooks:
At the heart of each laptop, children and teachers should be able to find the textbooks and learning materials their government requires. Hardware is only as good as the software it runs and if a child can’t learn algebra or study Mongolian history on his or her Mongolia XO laptop I don’t see what the point is. Imagine the increase in value your product would receive if they included every government-required textbook from 1st to 12th grade in ebook format? Even if the machines couldn’t handle the content, being able to deliver updates electronically as the children advance in grades would revolutionize governments ability to quickly distribute curriculum updates to schools. Non-negotiable conclusion: Children must be able to study their required subjects on your laptops.

Subject-specific software:
Another tool that is needs attention is subject-specific software. Most education systems around the world teach similar subjects. Why not a math app? Or a chemistry app? These apps could be easily translated into local languages and used for beginning to advanced classes based on need. Some of these tools may already exist or be available on your laptops, but are they presented in a way so a math teacher in Mongolia can link his lesson to the software?

Partnerships:
The XO might be a king of open source, but whatever happened to partnerships? You make a good laptop, but face it, there are others out there excelling in their areas of expertise. Why not approach Google to come up with a cacheable version of Google Earth for geography class? Can you imagine education programmers helping you create digital classrooms so teachers can easily send students assignments and receive their work? The point is that there are people and companies available that are good at what they do and who want to help, they just need to be given a chance.

Knowledge bank:
A digital encyclopedia. A portable Wikipedia. Partner with encyclopedia companies to provide digital content, leave open areas where students can add and edit subjects they are learning about. Updated encyclopedias released? No need to ship off 30 volume book sets, just send off electronic copies to all your schools for instant distribution and updates.

Note-taking software:
When a student is working on math equations in class where does he or she take notes? When a teacher presents the major cities of the world on an interactive map, where can the student jot this down for further study? These machines need a deeply integrated note-taking app that works across all programs so students can save work and notes by subject. It should be simple, intuitive, and oh, it needs to be easy to back up to a school server or flash disk.

Make it more available:
With the XO now available in bulk quantities as low as 100, it is becoming easier for NGOs and schools not covered by a government program to get a hold of these laptops. However, the schools and NGO programs who would greatly benefit from your laptops but don’t need 100 are still left out in the cold. It’s understandable that your programs are young and still getting off the ground, but the market is there, and more importantly, the children are there, so why make it so hard for people helping 75 children in a poor community when the school down the street with 500 students has no problem? Find a distributor, setup a side company, do something so that your product is more readily available. 

In conclusion, I would like to commend you, OLPC and Intel, for leading the charge in bringing technology into developing countries to improve children’s education. However, I do hope that some steps are taken to ensure that your product is really a benefit to children, is usable and can be integrated into what schools are teaching. Again, in countries where even providing $20 of textbooks to children is a struggle, your product needs a lot of added value to justify its purchase and use. Let’s remember that the primary goal in bringing technology into classrooms is not simply to bring the technology, but to give children and teachers a tool that greatly increases their ability to grow and develop while learning in new and creative ways.

I will be watching the advancement of your programs with anticipation.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Renich
Edurelief Founder / CEO

Proving it with GPS →

We believe in proving what we are doing to our donors, volunteers, and the rest of the general public. We want our work to be transparent and understandable, showing that people’s time and monetary investments are actually doing something good. One way we do this is by plotting out all of our programs on Google Maps/Earth and sharing that via our website and newsletters. In the past we had been tagging schools manually with satellite images to find their location. This task will now be much easier and more accurate thanks to ION who recently donated the funds necessary for a GPS unit which will help things move a lot quicker. Can’t wait to see a map of Mongolia covered with little “+”s to signify the school libraries and other projects we’ve been able to start… Thank you ION!