From Bankstown to Jigalong and Yirrkala : supporting pre-service teachers in the deployment of XO laptops

The paper outlines the learning experienced by educators from the University of Western Sydney (UWS) as they worked with the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) Australia charity to deploy purpose designed XO laptops in remote communities across Northern Australia. The focus of this paper is the three different deployments of XO laptops in: Jigalong Remote Community School, Western Australia; Yirrkala School, Northern Territory; and Yirrkala Homeland School, which comprises a number of small, homeland schools near Yirrkala, Northern Territory. The XO laptop is a simple, cheap and rugged laptop built to work in remote areas of the globe. It runs on the Linux operating system and comes with open-source applications geared towards educational use and collaboration. The main purpose of the XO laptops is to enable children living in remote areas access to modern forms of education. The teacher educators from UWS in collaboration with OLPC Australia applied their learning from previous experiences in ICT and professional experience and prepared UWS pre-service teachers to undertake a service learning activity with OLPC Australia. The first deployment involved educators participating in a deployment and gain first-hand experience to help plan future deployments that involved pre-service teachers; in the second deployment the plan developed from the Jigalong experience was executed with the support of two Indigenous preservice teachers from UWS; then it was refined for the third deployment involving 12 pre-service teachers from UWS in the homeland schools surrounding Yirrkala. This third deployment was a combination of group training with classroom teachers, and on-site implementation of the uses of XO laptops to achieve learning outcomes.