Monday, July 20, 2009

Student Deployment - Day 1 and 2



This past week we began our deployment to the students. Monday was our official launch, confirmed by the headmaster, teachers and our translator. What none of them told us was that it is a national holiday. These people really don’t ever want to tell us no even when they mean it. When we showed up at 8am ready to go it was a ghost town. We postponed our deployment until Tuesday…



Tuesday morning it was the same drill: load the laptops into the car, head over to the school and set up shop. Today there were lots of kids at the school checking their final grades and hanging out with other children. We started checking the students in, registering their laptops to the network and the server and switching the system to Portuguese.



After we had around 50 students checked in I ran a short presentation about the handling and care of the XO: don’t touch the screen, don’t drop it, don’t bend the cord, etc. We let the kids play with the laptops for the rest of the day because we knew it would be hard to keep them focused. At the end of the day we explained that we would take the laptops back that night until their parents met with us to discuss the importance of not selling the laptop. We packed up the laptops and brought them home to charge for the next day.

-XO Mike

2 comments:

  1. How exciting it must have been to finally get the laptops into the hands of the users!

    I don't understand why the culture thinks it's nicer to avoid the truth and inconvenience/disappoint you by just not showing up. Weird!

    Again, love the pictures. Your blog is a great diary that you'll look back on years from now. Thanks for sharing with all of us.
    xoxo
    Mom

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey, Michael--When I was still in the education business, we would occasionally puzzle why a student or a class didn't "get it". Then what we saw the "Aha" moment. The learner(s) had things click together. Here's hoping you and the team see "Aha!"

    Thanks for sending your reports.

    Love you--AK

    ReplyDelete