Why just inner city schools???

great idea, just need to give these olpc a bit more power.

Empathetics, did you know that it's a legal, not hardware, issue that keeps the official Adobe Flash player from shipping on the OLPC? You can install it later. Or you can live with the free and open Gnash, which admittedly doesn't play youTube videos, yet.
I'm pretty sure the WindowsXP version would ship with Adobe Flash. It'd just cost more.
So what else do you think it can't do?

Why would we want to give every student OLPC laptops (designed for developing countries) which lack so much functionality (no flash/shockwave, preventing them from using webapps, for example) as opposed to pushing for something further? There's so much that you can't do with these machines, I think it would be the wrong ask to make.

{{ a good library with a bunch of desktops and a great library skills teacher is the answer }}

How many books can be stored on a 500 GB drive? Every home can have a great library now. A computer can search any word sequence. Libraries are obsolete. A laptop shud B a good portable book reader. Kids could send questions wirelessly 2 teachers.

Sum ppl don't want to give up obsolete methods.

{{{ Computers are just tools, and unless there's a fundamental change ..no amount of technology...is going to help. }}}

I think there is a way to make them a revolution. I used science fiction books to learn about science and the nuns had science books they never gave us. There are free sci-fi books for download in the Gutenberg Project. Download them and use these computers as book readers.

jps one problem I think teachers need better salaries but we also need a way to weed out the bad with out the teachers union crying, back in the mid 80s georgia passed new testing for all students and all teachers, first year 80% ?? of the students failed and 65% ?? of teachers, NAACP and teachers union went ballistic threaten lawsuits, GA's answer lower standards so most passed

I second Yish. Flood them with cheap laptops, not nessesarily OLPC.
And try to be fair, flood EVERYONE with cheap and rugged laptops.

I like it, but I will vote for this one after we have flooded them with halved class sizes and doubled teacher salaries.

i have two 7 yr olds and me, a 28 yr old, that use them non-stop they love them, and use them from when they get home until they go to bed, i think that all <13yr olds should be on XOs, not just inner city schools, it would be part of what is spent on textbooks, and have the books electronically sent over the SchoolServer to the XOs. so $200/Kid over 5 years is less then $200/book after 13 upgrade

@Jeff, while I agree kids should have laptops, handing out laptops won't start any revolutions. Computers are just tools, and unless there's a fundamental change in our education system, no amount of technology in the world is going to help.

I'd add a 1 for the basic idea but I'm out of votes, heh.

Sll

Good idea. I've got one. The keyboard is annoying but it is more rugged than a lot of more xpensive laptops.

Oprah spent $40 million on a school for 152 girls. She could have gotten 200,000 OLPCs for that. DUMB!!!

its my hope that such laptops are standard issue for kids, lots of people have trouble with jobs because they cannot learn or update basic computer skills.

yes, just the idea not necessarily that particular box

OLPC as a concept, yes. Don't stick to a particular product. I love the XO, but the EEE is just as good. Anything that's small, light, robust, open source and cheap.

sorry, this one is mine but I forgot to log on first. there are ways that our inner city schools are like schools in developing nations. this & similar initiatives could spark an educational revolution; we *could* have a new generation of innovators. - jeffsonstein -