Decidedly, the Uruguay , this small country squeezed between two giants, Brazil and Argentina, do not cease to surprise. It took less than two years to this country to deploy nearly 300,000 XO laptops in schools, under the Plan Ceibal . This plan "Conectividad Básica Educativa de Informática para el Aprendizaje en línea, whose guidelines have been summarized in a reference guide for parents and educators, was conducted in four phases in succession, starting with 200 XO in a pilot school, then expanding the department of Florida, then to other departments within the country, and finally to the capital, Montevideo.

It is a laboratory of ideas and a space-scale experiments in many areas, as outlined in David Sasaki this article and this one ):

• the first deployment ,
• the creation of manuals ,
• the establishment of a support network , consisting of volunteers,
• the establishment of connections wifi around schools,
• the establishment of service centers ,
• creating an economic base with calls for tenders, for example for the repair of XO,
• creating a community of bloggers school ,
• building a community of developers of activities for schools,
• integration tool XO in the pedagogy of teachers.

On this last point that recently, a primary school teacher, Norma Ramirez Rosamel Mendez, recounts his experience in his blog . She describes the trigger it was by attending training on the learning environment Etoys , available on the XO form of activity :

By attending the third course in-class on Etoys, I had a click in the region of the brain, finally there. And I said, 'Eureka! It would be great for the natural sciences! '.

Finally, the primary school teacher, who is more familiar than any new technology, and whose job is precisely to teach, began to imagine an implementation of the educational training that she attended. By trial and error, she finally went to this:

That is why today, managing to enliven the steam I had drawn and escaping from the kettle: changes of state of matter, the action of heat as a variable, the water vapor in air ... I found myself almost jubilant jumping for joy!

C'es t from this click that this teacher may consider creating a class for its animation that illustrates a physical mechanism (with one illustration in video). It is in the context of this personal triumph that this teacher was selected, with other colleagues participating in the Plan Ceibal to participate in July at the international meeting Squeafest in Porto Alegre!

This will be an opportunity to exchange experiences, to enrich the teaching practice in schools in Uruguay and elsewhere. This will be one of the many contributions of the South, to reduce the digital divide, in line with the participation of Miguel Brechner, the Laboratorio Tecnológico del Uruguay ( LATU ), who is the supervisor Plan Ceibal to share the experience gained in Uruguay with Rwanda , on the occasion of the establishment of the OLPC program in this country.

are volunteers