Kindles For Kids

Posted: December 8th, 2013 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 1 Comment »

This is not a Bridge International Academy. At least not yet.

Great NPR blog by Lynn Neary on the wonderful nonprofit called World Reader:

“[E-readers] turn out to be remarkably well-adapted to the developing world, in part because they don’t take very much power, they are very portable. It’s almost like having an entire library in your hand and, like all technology, they get less and less expensive over time,” Risher says.

A study of the Worldreaders pilot program in Ghana was funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Tony Bloome, a senior education technology specialist with USAID, says the initial results were mostly positive.

“We definitely found that it provided more access to materials. That wasn’t surprising at all,” says Bloome. “I think kids’ appreciation and use of technology is somewhat universal in terms of the excitement — so much so [that] the kids would sit on their devices because they were concerned they would be stolen. And that led to one of the challenges we had in terms of breakage.”

Worldreader has responded to the breakage problem with tougher e-readers and training for students and teachers in how to handle them. Even with the breakage problem, though, the USAID study found the program to be cost effective. It also found that kids who had never used a computer before learned to use e-readers quickly and it didn’t take them long to find games and music. But Bloome says that their excitement was contagious.

Read the whole thing here.

We’ll get their one day for our pupils. The prices of these devices are dropping.

For now, we don’t have a good way to make it work financially. I think a fully-loaded Kindle from WorldReader is $140 if I recall what David told me. For our families that’s 2 years of tuition. And fundraising doesn’t scale very well.

Things start to look better if:

We can amortize over 2 years when considering breakage, loss, and wear and tear from a device that we’d probably use 6+ hours a day. Drops price to $70.

We can share among 6 pupils. Now each pupil is at $12/device for “shared access.”

Could we increase tuition by 50 cents a month? 6 kids times .50/mo * 24 months = $72 per device which needs to last, on average, for 2 years.

I’m eager to experiment in a single school to see if we can “get it going” in one classroom, and then see if that affects parent desire.