Deploying the British Granny Cloud to tutor poor Indian classrooms over Skype

This BBC video-clip describes the latest ingenious project from Sugata Mitra, an Indian-born professor at Newcastle University. You'll most likely know Mitra from his Hole in the Wall computers set into the walls of buildings in India's poorest slums. Mitra's new project uses the "UK Granny Cloud" -- a large group of British grannies who've agreed to volunteer an hour a week to tutor Indian classrooms over Skype video conferences -- to supplement education in Indian schools where there is a shortage of teachers.

Gateshead Granny Cloud (Thanks, Avisolo, via Submitterator!)

• [pKp]

  @digithed : if I remember S. Mitra’s TED talk correctly (can’t watch the vid now, I’m at work), the grannies aren’t there to do the actual teaching; they’re here to encourage the kids by being enthusiastic and supportive. Basically, they’re saying stuff like “Great !” and “This looks fascinating, can you explain it to me ?”. Even with the thickest accent, that kind of comments can’t be too hard to understand.

  Also, this guy is awesome, and the “Hole in the Wall” project TED talk is one of the most fascinating education-related pieces I’ve ever seen.

  • [digithed]

    Don’t take my comment too seriously. I was only joking ;-)

• [Anonymous]

  From the video, it appears that Sugata Mitra is onto something good, but a tiny bit of the back of my mind sees people complaining about this scheme to import cheap labour from some other country through a “sleep dealer”-esque like scheme taking jobs away from the local workforce.

  Sleep Dealer (2008) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0804529/

• [dross1260]

  Fab!
  What happens when they ask “Why?”

• [Amelia_G]

  Wow!

  There are many partner schools &c. who want to skype with schoolchildren in Bali, but the Balinese internet connection options are too slow. Went over with webcams, digicams and big ideas in an economic development class last summer but didn’t manage to do much besides install and teach how to use Google Earth.

• [george57l]

  In other news today – going in the other direction – on the BBC Today radio news programme this morning I heard that Pearson (do they still own the FT?) just bought an Indian firm beaming Indian tutors into classrooms via the net. They say UK is not a target and with a hugely growing classroom population in India, that is enough, but one UK school is already doing this – using Indian tutors in India for remedial maths over the net. How about we put our Grannies in our own (UK) classrooms instead?

• [Amelia_G]

  Also: the iPad is a very effective teaching aid. It’s robust and small. 1-year-olds understood the “spawn glow” game on the touchscreen. Older kids could play with Google Earth, from the ocean floor to outer nebulae. Kids practiced typing in English. (You could get them to start by typing in their names, very helpful!) It got kids’ attention, not that they weren’t wonderfully polite and cheerful anyway–the novel device helped them pay attention longer.

  I visited several elementary schools and an orphanage for young victims of poverty, disability and tsunami, and I was most effective at the orphanage where the kids immediately taught each other what I had just taught them. You show three kids e.g. Google Earth and the chicken dance, and next thing you know the whole orphanage is mousing the world around and yelling, “Hey! ‘Da da da da da da da’!”

• [Anonymous]

  That is freakin’ awesome!! Makes me want to go back and learn things.

• [ewendel]

  The laptops look a bit like the XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child program.

  http://one.laptop.org/

  They are available in the U.S.; it looks like the best place to buy them is eBay. It’s a pretty neat design for a child’s first laptop, and the prices are really reasonable. ($100-200, based on eBay.)

  http://www.olpcnews.com/laptops/xo1/how_to_buy_xo_laptop_olpc.html

• [Anonymous]

  This is freaking awesome!

  My only (little) gripe is the name. I know there’s quite a lot of older women (my nan for one) who would love to get involved in something like this, but would balk at the idea of being refered to as a ‘Granny.’ Vain, but true.

  • [Amelia_G]

    Hi Anon,

    Know what you mean! But it kinda seems a good name for it. I mean, I’m… old enough to be a grandmother where I grew up but still under 40, and have about a dozen nieces and nephews, and basically I behave as a granny to them. No idea what an aunt does. Have decades of the nuclear family reduced my learning about the available roles? Anyway, I’d appreciate anyone’s ideas about granny versus auntie, it’s something I’ve been wondering about for quite some time as I found myself slipping into granny mode merely because other people decided to have kids.

    Cheers,
    A

• [Anonymous]

  I can’t be the only one thinking “Diamond Age” by Neal Stephenson.

• [robulus]

  DEPLOY THE BRITISH GRANNY CLOUD!!! DO IT NOW!!!!

• [EdCS]

  To me the most exiting part of that is the idea of kids teaching themselves. It’s something they played around with when I was in Sixth Form (16-18 education) in the UK, but I think it would have been far more effective earlier.

• [Anonymous]

  As a parent of young children who are approaching the age at which I want to start their computer education, I’d really like to know what laptops they were using. They looked great!

  • [Anonymous]

    Try doing an image search for “classmate computer”.
    That should help you find a computer like they have.

• [Anonymous]

  How can there be a shortage of teachers in India, a country of over 1 billion people that spends over $100 billion dollars on defense? That has $1.25 billion dollars to spend on space exploration? Fark them. They need to get their house in order.

• [slgalt]

  Mitra has a TED talk about child driven education: http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html

• [digithed]

  But if the grannies come from Gateshead how will the kids in Indian understand a word they’re saying?
  People in London have a hard time understanding people with a Geordie accent, what hope have the poor Indian kids got? ;-)