A Connected Planet

Programs: During this year a connected planet (acp) expanded its technology program at its partner school society of our lady of the most holy trinity (solt) mission in kobonal, haiti. The focus of the expansion was the introduction of a srtab mobile learning classroom, a multimedia mobile classroom technology, into the school system. This added 50 more tablets to the school's inventory, a data server and a smart whiteboard system. Acp personnel spent a total of nine weeks in the school conducting training and collecting research on the use of the technology. The training included technical and pedagogical training for teachers after-school and training with both teachers and students in the classroom. The majority of the effort focused on the use of the interactive whiteboard technology in the classroom with open education resource (oer) digital content obtained from a variety of sources. We continued defining and documenting the 'best practices' for the use of tablet computers and the multimedia system in the classroom in developing countries. The methods, procedures, results and findings of the program have been documented and are available on our web site in both english and french. Our efforts and resulting documentation were applauded by the haitian ministry of education and are being used by other organizations to 'quick-start' their programs. During the coming year we will be returning to conduct follow up testing, evaluate new oer and to upgrade some equipment to address deficiencies noted this year.

acp continued efforts this year to develop education applications for mobile devices in haitian creole language. To date we have fielded over a dozen applications which are available for free in the google play and apple itunes stores. Acp has been developing two types of education-related mobile applications. The first type of applications is general education apps which are used to teach basic letter, word and number recognition. The second type of application is mother tongue books apps. Mother tongue books (mtb) is a program started by the matnwa community learning center on the island of la gonve, haiti. They work with haitian children in schools to write and illustrate short stories. Acp has converted several of these books into standalone mobile applications which include the book, audio, student testing and teacher guides. The applications support the haitian creole, french, and english languages. This year we conducted several key events. We established a key partnership with ecole suprieure d'infotronique d'hati (esih) university in port-au-prince, haiti. Using classroom space on their campus we conducted a pilot workshop to teach mobile application development. We had 18 participants from academic, public and private sectors. During the workshop we identified four esih students with exceptional skills and we started an internship program at esih. We paid the four interns a stipend to work over the summer developing mother tongue book applications. We have over 60 of these applications now undergoing final quality control reviews before being published to the google play store. We are also still advising the french organization haiti futur on the digitization of education curriculum materials. Acp is seeking grant funding from various organizations to support the oer application development program; however, acp will continue funding the effort internally and through donations.

acp continued providing policy and planning support to the department of defense, united states central command (uscentcom) in the areas of information sharing and dissemination. The task grew this year with the addition of a new adviser and a part time researcher. This task is a follow-on activity to the afghan information sharing project conducted during previous years. Acp provides an unclassified information sharing (uis) liaison officer to various national level agencies in the washington dc national capital region and an adviser at uscentcom headquarters in tampa, fl. The primary focus of their work is on the development of policies and procedures that allow information sharing. For example, acp spearheaded initiatives to share threat alert messages with non-profit, commercial and military partners in the conflict areas of iraq, syria and afghanistan. They are currently working on the policy changes required to release other types of information.