Project Ceibal

Project Ceibal in Uruguay transforms the life of 450,000 students through rolling out one laptop per child nationwide. National testing from assessment to analysis is delivered in one week.

According to the World Bank Uruguay is the only country in the world where all students in publicly-supported primary schools have been provided with their own free laptop computer.

Now that (almost) all Uruguayan schools are connected to the Internet and work is well underway to put free laptops in the hands of all public secondary school students, Plan Ceibal is in many ways entering phase two of its ambitious initiative. The technical infrastructure is (largely) there -- the challenge now is to maintain it, to improve and enhance it, and, more importantly, to ensure that it is used effectively to support a variety of new and improved teaching and learning practices that will help Uruguayan students developed the knowledge, skills and attitudes to succeed in increasingly globalized, knowledge economies.

An important part of this challenge will be to make sure that teachers are supported and incentivized -- through sufficient technical support, relevant content, and more importantly, through a rich set of training activities, professional development programs and pedagogical support networks -- to take advantage of all that the new technological infrastructure offers, while at the same time becoming savvier about where doing things 'the old fashioned way' is still the most appropriate course of action.

Phase two of Plan Ceibal will not just be about 'more of the same, only better', however. An ambitious set of new programs and initiatives are now planned or underway as well, including:

• the conversion of all secondary and technical school (and some primary school) science labs into 'digital labs', utilizing sensors and other 'probeware' devices
• the piloting of new educational robotics curriculum
• new online nationwide mathematics contest
• the expansion of pilot efforts in online assessment and evaluation
• a roll-out of Plan Ceibal into kindergarten classrooms on a voluntary basis (teachers submit plans to Ceibal for funding)
• the regular refreshment/replacement of OLPC XO laptops already delivered
• a new Plan Ceibal Digital Library, to include 100+ books and other educational materials (such as those from the Khan Academy), hosted on local school servers.