Transforming education: the power of ICT policies - Commonwealth ...

To illustrate the resources currently available, Figure 9 shows them grouped by curricular area.
Figure 9: Total Resources Available in Portal Ceibal
Source: Ceibal, 2009b
Within this portal, there is also a Moodle platform that offers e-learning courses and workshops. Until mid 2010, the
portal had almost 5,000 registered users, and is also the only portal with access statistics.
Finally, it could be said that digital resources are mainly available in Ceibal and Uruguay Educa Web portals (more
than 16,000 in total); however, not all of them are explicitly linked to national curriculum contents.
On the other hand, the “Rayuela” project (launched in November, 2008) is a three-year term programme implemented
by the LATU (and fi nanced by the IDB) that, among other goals, aims to transform Uruguay in an international
referent regarding the design and development of digital learning contents in Spanish.
Plans/strategies related to ICT teacher training, technological training, pedagogical training
Teacher training was developed in two stages:
apple First stage – Cascade strategy: started in 2008, focused on principals, inspectors and technology teachers, as
intermediate actors, and it involved two steps; the fi rst one tried to prepare teachers for the Plan Ceibal
implementation, XO features and the preliminary strategies to integrate this technology into learning processes;
and the second had as main goal to achieve a deeper knowledge about how to apply ICT to teaching; and
apple Second Stage – Face-to-face and e-learning strategy: since 2009, it incorporated technology teachers (“Maestros
Dinamizadores” and “Maestros Apoyo Ceibal”) to mentor and train colleagues about the curricular ICTintegration,
via collaborative activities, and by sharing the results of pedagogical experiences.
Until mid 2010, there were four main action lines in the complementary training component of Ceibal:
apple Face-to-face courses;
apple Educational Television: short programmes developed by LATU experts, emitted both on the offi cial TV channel
and others, and also available for downloading from the CEIP web portal;
apple E-learning training: online courses and workshops about XO software, supported on a Moodle platform
available in the Ceibal portal, and with the assistance of almost 40 tutors from CEIP. Some of these workshops
are about: 1:1 models; collaborative work, ICT teacher skills; pedagogical use of XO-etoys; and digital learning
resources, among others; and
apple Digital resources on CD: to use in schools, as support to prepare lessons that include ICT use: tutorials, digital
objects, etc.
Case Study: Uruguay | 147