In an effort to ensure that laptops provided to students in schools are not stolen, the Ministry of Education through the OLPC project has enabled a security feature forcing all laptops that are not in schools to shut down. Today 124 schools and a little over 61,000 children are enjoying the usage of the laptops all around the country. More schools are being targeted as the government has now received an additional 35,000 laptops of which 32,000 are of the latest version the XO Revision 1.5. According to the OLPC project this should correspond to about an additional 70 schools that should be enabled with the program. This effectively place Rwanda as the largest deployment out of South America.
The security feature has been added to the laptops during a re-flash process where all 65,000 laptops had been updated with the latest software and additional educational activities to ensure that the laptops are used in a more effective manner. This was to provide a solution to the lack of use of laptops noticed in some schools, during the pilot phase, where these courses had not been loaded. However according to Nkubito Bakuramutsa, the National OLPC coordinator, the project is rethinking its approach to private schools and those who have purchased laptops will be enabled with digital content from primary 4 to primary 6 on SD cards.
The security feature has triggered a current exercise of visiting schools, checking on the count of laptops, recapturing serial numbers as well as repairing the failing ones, according to Patrick Mugabo, the officer in charge of logistics. Any laptops which will not be enabled by the OLPC engineers, will remain in a failing state until they are brought back to the schools or to the Ministry.
The activation process of laptops, which began last week in the southern province, will continue until the entire country is covered. While today this process is being done manually, servers being installed at schools will take over and automate this process by the end of the year.
With the OLPC project, primary students in Rwanda are being exposed not only to ICTs but also to a new way of learning by doing. Already over 1000 teachers have been trained to the new methodology of teaching using laptops. The Ministry of Education is committed to enhance the quality of education through the integration of technology as one of the strategy of meeting its National Kivu retreat goals.
To get a sense of the change this project is bringing in schools, the community is invited to join the National OLPC Scratch activity, which will happen in September 2011.
Scott
Jul 18, 2011 @ 03:23:28
What is the security program featured in this blog post?
One Laptop Per Child Rwanda
Sep 27, 2011 @ 12:12:32
Hello moodyfscott: we apologise for taking long to reply.
The Security Key featured in this post is an anti-theft protection part of the built-in Bitfrost security system that comes with every XO. Consists of file named lease.sig containing a cryptographic signature tied to a specific XO laptop that provides the ability for the system to run up until a set date and time. Laptops can have the security system active but also be pre-activated meaning that they will never request or use an activation, even though the rest of the features of the security system remain active. This Security system will be continuously re-updated and upgraded by school server every time a laptop will connect to it (just switched on within school compound), this will make each laptop to be taken school within a range of time, and help schools control its property (laptops) regularly.
For more information about Anti-theft protection:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Bitfrost#P_THEFT:_anti-theft_protection“>
Thanks for your interest, if any problem please don hesitate to ask.