URUGUAY'S PLAN CEIBAL

Uruguay's Plan Ceibal: The world's most ambitious roll-out of educational technologies? Submitted by Michael Trucano on Fri, 09/18/2009 - 22:19

"It is the most profound and irreversible of revolutions" said Uruguayan President Tabaré Vázquez of the myriad changes that information and communications technologies are having on societies. President Vázquez was speaking at an event sponsored by the Inter-american Development Bank in Washington last September 2009 to highlight his country's accomplishments under what may be the world's most ambitious nationwide roll-out of computers in a country's education system.


Plan Ceibal, the education reform initiative that is aiming (most famously) to provide one laptop for every student and teacher in Uruguay, is set, according to project director Miguel Brechner, to achieve 'full deployment' at the primary level by the end of this month, and is now targeting secondary education as well. Brechner's very informative presentation provided insight into the context, scale and ambition behind the initiative, and included some very intriguing preliminary results. Noting the changes that have occured since the project began to roll-out just a few years ago in partnership with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, Bechner stated that, when it came to individual access to personal computing for all students in Uruguay, "What was a privilege in 2006 is a right in 2009". The Uruguayan example, Brechner continued, shows that it is indeed possible to provide a laptop (for free) to every student, and how this can be done. In the case of Uruguay, "costs are manageable", he said, and "impacts are immediate". Uruguay's interest in serving as a global model for educational transformation enabled in large part by 1-to-1 computing for students is laudable, and Brechner's presentation was rather unique in that it shared cost data of the sort that is rarely published officially.


published by World Bank