Ceibal project

• To improve the quality of education through the new technological system.
• Providing computers to every scholar and teacher of the public education, promote the same opportunities for all.
• To develop a culture based on collaboration between children, a child and teacher, teachers with each other, families and school.
• To promote a sense of criticism of technology on the pedagogical community.
• To provide an internet connection at home as well as at school to all students.

Students with XO laptops

• To promote the laptops as a useful tool in the schools.
• To offer the teachers a suitable technological and pedagogical formation of the new technologies.
• To produce educational resources, with the new technological tools.
• To inspire an innovational mind of the teachers.
• To assure a good development of the project by a supportive system and technological assistance.
• To involve the parents in the implementation of the project, not only in the schools but also in the houses of the scholars.
• To promote the proportion of relevant information of all the people involved in the project, in order to improve it.

The project allows primary school children between fourth and sixth grades to have three 45 minute slots per week of English: one taught by a remote teacher, model of language and in charge of introducing and explaining the linguistic content corresponding to each week through his remote presence via videoconference equipment; and two forty-five-minute slots with the classroom teacher, who following the lesson plans sent to her every week, may review, accompany and guide her students in the learning of English. Lesson plans are associated to digital and non-digital materials, which contain songs, games, videos, etc., so that those contents already presented and explained by the remote teacher, may be revised, reviewed and recycled under the conduction of the classroom teacher. Coherence between remote lessons and face to face lessons is ensured by a half-hour virtual coordination between the two teachers involved in the learning process, in which concerns, learning and teaching styles are discussed.

Each classroom teacher decides whether she wants to participate in this project, she does not need to know any English, but she receives an on-line course of English so that she can be one step ahead of her students and give them the necessary support.

This project was piloted in twenty schools in the country between June and November 2012; five in the south (three in Maldonado and two in Pando, Canelones), and fifteen in the north between Salto and Paysandú, with a total of 37 groups. The group in the south started on June 23, and the one in the north on August 23.

The results of the pilot phase are highly encouraging, for this reason, Ceibal en Inglés has expanded the project to one thousand groups in 2013. Plan Ceibal through an open international bid chose the British Council, a British organization of recorded experience in the teaching of English as a foreign language internationally, as its partner for this project.

On Thursday, 9 January 2014, the BBC Mundo website published an article entitled "Thousands of children in Uruguay learn English with distance teachers". The report highlights the work done by Plan Ceibal and explains that "this is the first time in the world where telepresence technology is used to teach English to large classes of primary school students in the state system", according to Paul Woods, representative of the British Council, the organization providing the teaching materials.

Also called "Marcianita", this version was very limited with a very slow processor and a total of 300 MB of RAM, the storage was around 1-2 GBs, it was mostly white with green details.

This model was white with a logo on the lid composed of a circle on top of an X, both encrusted on the lid and being of random colors.

It had a green membrane keyboard that was pretty similar to any other laptop keyboard, with the exception of having all the F1 through F12 keys replaced with symbols that indicated their new functions as well as some other minor changes.

It had a simple mouse pad with 2 buttons, one with an X and one with an O as symbols, unlike most modern mousepads, it didn't accept more than one input at once and couldn't perform gestures like tap-and-hold or double finger swiping.

It had 2 sets of 4 buttons at each side of the screen, with the left one being a single piece d-pad and the other side having 4 buttons, with the symbols X, O, a checkmark symbol and a triangle, these were apparently made for playing games but they were fairly unwieldy due to the screen's width and weight.

It sported 2 speakers, both at the sides of the screen and above each set of buttons, the microphone was located right below the screen, the earphone jack was located at the right border of the case, on the screen's side.

The top left and right of the screen had 2 green antennas that when withdrawn fitted perfectly with the rest of the case, these antennas concealed a pair of USB ports. The computer couldn't be "closed" without hiding the antennas first.

The laptop ran sugar, an open source OS based on Linux, which was fairly limited, the programs were called activities, only allowing one to run at the same time.

The computer had 4 sections which were accessed with F1, F2, F3 and F4. These keys had different logos to match all being represented with a black circle and green shapes. F1(community view) had 6 green dots near the border, F2 (group view) had 3 green dots near the center, F3 ?, F4 had a simple green rectangle.

First it had community view, which displayed other laptops of the same kind in the local network represented by the same logo on the lid of the computer, this screen allowed to form groups and perform other cooperative activities, especially inviting others to an activity which allowed more than one user, like the text editor.

Then it had the group view, this showed other computers on the same group, this wasn't so different from the community view other than trimming the amount of computers on-screen.

The "toolbox"(unknown real name) view had all of the installed activities ready to be launched.

The activity view showed the currently launched activity, this didn't work if no activity had been launched yet.

Buttons F5 to F8 had just black dots of increasing size, F9 to F12 had buttons to adjust volume and screen brightness.

As time went on, more improved versions of the ceibalita were made, this also included their hardware which was severely upgraded to fit the new features.

The keyboard was changed to a green plastic one and the mouse was improved to accept most gestures, eventually dropping the F1–F12 special keys, screen resolution was improved, their processor, storage and RAM also had significant upgrades. Later models changed to a blue motif instead of the old green one.

Sugar was upgraded to allow for more activities open at once between other features, the computer also came with Android installed and eventually also Linux, which could be switched by restarting, changing to sugar didn't require a restart but took a significant amount of time. Sugar was eventually dropped altogether from the latest models.

Usually targeted towards pre-schoolers, these tablets came with Android and a special educative OS with parental restrictions which required completing a simple mathematical operation to unlock.

Eventually, the original "Marcianita" model was discontinued and common laptop models where distributed in it's stead, these had a significantly more frail case, but their hardware had significant upgrades from the previous models, with storage being increased to 60 GB and getting 2.4Ghz Dual Core CPUs, these computers ditched Android in favor of Windows 10, but kept Linux.