by Vanity Fair writer and widow of Tom Russert, Maureen Orth, wrote a charming article about a small school she built in the Colombian Andes while a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s. Last week she returned to the school to present the school named for her by the local villagers with 230 XO laptops from the One Laptop Per Child Foundation.
From Orth’s article, The Long-Term Dividends of Volunteering:
Today, seeing how excited the children are about their small, green-and-white computers, which they are allowed to take home every night, is one of the greatest rewards I have ever had. I walked into the first grade classroom and had never seen kids so eager to learn. Their teacher, who had pooh-poohed the whole idea of computers and was on her way to retirement, was plunging right in.
Veteran educator Gary Stager, Ph.D. is the author of Twenty Things to Do with a Computer – Forward 50, co-author of Invent To Learn — Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, publisher at Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, and the founder of the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute. He led professional development in the world’s first 1:1 laptop schools thirty years ago and designed one of the oldest online graduate school programs. Gary is also the curator of The Seymour Papert archives at DailyPapert.com. Learn more about Gary here.