14,000 More XOs Coming to B'ham City Schools

As some of you know, I received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study the impacts of the XO laptops in B'ham City Schools. The School Board decided to begin with one elementary school this spring and then decide if they wanted to accept the other laptops. I found some additional funding to allow us to collect data at the pilot school. My team rushed to get pretest data from students at this pilot school before the laptops were distributed and we'll go back in the fall to do our posttest surveying. We planned to present our research findings to the School Board, hoping that it would help them make a decision on whether to accept the other laptops. It appears they've already made their decision -- without seeing any data from us at least.

The School Board voted yesterday to accept the remaining 14,000 XOs; they'll distribute them beginning in September. This is good news as my NSF grant is to study middle school students; so this fall we'll be really busy collecting pretest survey data on 2500 middle school students and then following up with them in the spring. We'll also be doing interviews with a small number of students and surveying teachers.

Here's to a busy fall semester collecting lots of data!

XO Laptops in Birmingham

Some of you may have noticed the link I put on my blog to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Organization a while back. This is the organization that developed the XO laptop for children in 3rd world countries.

The mayor of Birmingham, AL implemented a program to purchase an XO laptop for each child in grades 1 - 8 in Birmingham City schools, in an effort to eliminate the digital divide in Birmingham and help to better prepare youth for work in the increasingly technologically driven economy. Birmingham is the first school system in the US to disseminate the laptops on a large scale. The results from Birmingham will be useful for other cities across the US who are thinking about similar dissemination projects.

I sat in on some of the training conducted in Birmingham last week by the OLPC staff members. I was really surprised at the quality of the XOs and the range of things the XO can do.

I submitted a grant to the National Science Foundation back in January to fund a study evaluating the impact of the XO dissemination program in Birmingham. It was recently funded! Over the past few weeks my team and I have worked hard getting everything finalized for the study and then surveying students at the pilot school. We'll follow up with the students again in the fall. I think our findings will be beneficial for educational, governmental, and academic communities as we assess the educational and social impacts of the XOs.