Pocket PCs displaying e-textbooks in Kenyan experiment
Our Tip of the Day is surely from Bill Christie, who pointed to a BBC item headlined Kenya pilots Pocket PC education.
Dubbed “e-slates,” Pocket PCs are serving as textbook-substitutes in an experiment in Kenya, the work of a nonprofit called Eduvision. The photo on the left vividly reminds us of the textbook shortage in that country. And now the details:
“The e-slates contain all the sorts of information you’d find in a textbook and a lot more,” said Eduvision co-founder Maciej Sudra.
“They contain textual information, visual information and questions. Within visual information we can have audio files, we can have video clips, we can have animations.
“At the moment the e-slates only contain digitised textbooks, but we’re hoping that in the future the students will be able to complete their assignments on these books and send them to the teacher, and the teacher will be able to grade them and send them back to the student.”
Pocket PCs were chosen in place of desktops because they are more portable, so the children can take them home at night, and also because they’re also cheaper, making them cost-effective alternatives to traditional methods of learning.
Enormous potential
Eduvision co-founder Matthew Herren says families pay upwards of $100 a year for textbooks.
“Our system is something that we hope will be sustainable, and the money that they use towards textbooks could be used to buy e-slates instead, which can last more than a year, thereby reducing the cost of education.”
Pupils with an e-slate
E-slates have replaced books for 54 pupils. Moreover, the potential offered by e-slates is enormous. The content stored on them can be dynamically updated wirelessly, hence the need for wi-fi.
This means that they could include anything from new textbooks which have just come on stream, to other content like local information or even pages from the web.
The team have also devised a rather neat system for getting the information onto the devices.
First off, content is created and formatted for use on the e-slate.
A central operations centre distributes the material over a cheap satellite radio downlink to a satellite radio receiver in the school.
The information passes through a base station which beams it out wirelessly to the students. And so a new and enjoyable way of learning is born.
“I like using [the] e-slate because I can take it home to use it at night and I can use it because it has [a] battery,” said Viola, a pupil at Mbita Primary.
Fellow pupil Felix had a few problems: “At first I found it difficult, but when our teacher, Maureen, told me to go in early to teach me, I went. The next day I found it easy.”
Not everyone approves of the experiment. Among the concerns is lack of electricity for the machines, which need recharging. Also, Kilemi Mwiria, Kenyan assistant minister of education, says: “I think it’s a big leap, a big giant leap for schools, students and communities that don’t even know what a desktop computer is.” Another criticism is that the e-slates are fragile. In the future, however, the project will use rugged, rubber-coated units.
Related: MIT’s Third World computer and info we’ve run on the Simputer project.
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