Abstract
This chapter describes how the government of Uruguay believes that all children have the right to have technology at their fingertips and that all children have the right to connectivity and access to the internet, that it is as important to have electricity and running water as to have access to the internet, and that it would have a high impact on the country's technological deployment and, obviously, on education and teaching. The parts of the chapter are concerned with the technology and pedagogy relationship: how to improve pedagogy through technology, the importance of teaching English and math online with help of education inspectors and the teachers using modern platform—virtual classrooms, books in digital format, digital technology laboratories—that allows collaborative work, work on projects, logical thinking, an online assessment system. All these integrated tools transfer to the biggest investments which the author calls “global learning network.”
TopInternet At The Student’S Place Of Study
Uruguay is a small country (Wikipedia, 2018). If I look at the figures from Argentina and Colombia – fortunately Costa Rica, which is also a small country, Colombia overwhelms me with 8 million devices and I’d rather not hear how many there are in Argentina. In Uruguay, we have 566,000 beneficiaries (Plan Ceibal, 2015). This means all public-school students between first and ninth grade, or between the first class of elementary or primary school and the third class of secondary school, depending on how this is defined in different countries. We cover all students and all teachers, with 80% of them having Internet availability greater than 95%, and with 98% of students accessing the Internet at their place of study. We developed this basic infrastructure strongly since 2007. The work in the field of technological deployment (Croteau & Bergeron, 2001) allowed us to have optical fibre in all urban educational centres, with high-quality video conferencing equipment in those places, and access to the Internet in neighbourhoods requiring priority care or deprived neighbourhoods, in housing complexes, in hospitals, in public squares; i.e., wherever there is a Ceibal student, there is access to the Internet (see Figure 1).
The Internet is fundamental for the development of this plan, we believe in “the cloud” and we are working increasingly on “a centralised cloud infrastructure”.
Figure 1. Deployment of WiFi and video network
We deliver tablets in the first, second, and third grade of elementary schools; laptops which work both as a laptop and tablet in the third grade; and common laptops in the first grade of secondary school or seventh grade.
TopComputer Access Per Student
In terms of computer access per person, it started to grow in 2007, and today we have no digital divide between the richest and the poorest (see Figure 2). If I would have to synthesise something in a graphic about Uruguay and Plan Ceibal, I would choose this one.
Figure 2. PC access, according to per capita income quintiles. Total for the country, in percentage of households
Key Terms in this Chapter
Plan Ceibal: The program created in Uruguay in 2006 as an inclusion program.
On-Line Platform: The basic hardware (computer, servers, network) and software (operating systems, web-applications) for collective project work over the internet.
Technological Deployment: A part of technology trilogy (together with business strategy and organizational performance) based on the strategic impact of the information system department, the technological architecture, the information system performance evaluation and technological scanning, contributes directly to organizational performance for the strategic activities’ analyzer, while it contributes indirectly to organizational performance.
Global Learning Network: New project of the Plan Ceibal.
Pedagogy Relationship: Special kind of personal relationship between adult and child or adult and student that is different from other personal relationships.