Recently, Sugata Mitra, an education innovator, won the $1 million dollars TED prize for his plan this year to start the “School in the Cloud,” which is essentially a computer lab where children in Indian can learn in a student-driven environment. The toolkit affords parents and teachers what he calls self-organized learning environments, or SOLES, for kids ages 8-12. Digipreneurship educators will leverage the new E-learning environment to help expand its recent grant supported by Best Buy and the Jaguar Foundation, for peer-to-peer outreach in digital literacy and basic computer skills.
“My wish is to help design the future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their innate sense of wonder and work together. Help me build the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can embark on intellectual adventures by engaging and connecting with information and mentoring online. I also invite you, wherever you are, to create your own miniature child-driven learning environments and share your discoveries.”
Sugata Mitra hopes to engage communities, parents, schools, and afterschool programs worldwide, to transform the way kids learn, by sharing the Self Organized Learning Environment’s (SOLE) toolkit, how-to videos, and educational resources. As well, he hopes to gather feedback from the School in the Cloud laboratory and the global community of SOLE educators to help shape the future of learning. The feedback will be used to create a blueprint, free for others to copy and scale, and a web-based public commons of educational resources.