A new BBC article - Kenya pilots handheld education -
looks at a school in Kenya where "fifty-four 11-year-old students are willing guinea pigs in an extraordinary experiment aimed at using technology to deliver education across the continent.In the Eduvision pilot project,textbooks are out,customised Pocket PCs,referred to as e-slates, are very much in.They are wi-fi enabled and run on licence-free open source software to keep costs down."The e-slates contain all the sorts of information you'd find in a textbook and a lot more," said Eduvision co-founder Maciej Sudra."They contain textual information,visual information and questions. Within visual information we can have audio files,we can have video clips,we can have animations."At the moment the e-slates only contain digitised textbooks,but we're hoping that in the future the students will be able to complete their assignments on these books and send them to the teacher,and the teacher will be able to grade them and send them back to the student."Pocket PCs were chosen in place of desktops because they are more portable,so the children can take them home at night, and also because they're also cheaper, making them cost-effective alternatives to traditional methods of learning".
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